Google delists Mike Adams’ NaturalNews.com. His hilarious tantrum about the “conspiracy” behind it is epic, as is my schadenfreude.

Regular readers here are probably familiar with Mike Adams and his website NaturalNews.com. Forget the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, when it comes to wretched hives of scum and quackery on the Internet, NaturalNews is the wretchedest, scummiest, and quackiest. Not surprisingly, Adams got his start in wingnuttery selling Y2K scams nearly 18 years ago. Now, besides presiding over a scammy online publishing empire that racks in considerable green by publishing articles laced with quackery, antivaccine pseudoscience, character assassination, and thuggery, both legal and getting a bit too close to inciting violence, Mikey fancies himself a scientist. (He also fancies himself a rapper and musician, but the less said about his rapping and vocal stylings, the better.) He’s even gone so far as to purchase a used mass spectrometer and use it to analyze everything from his competitors’ supplements to Flint water to the flu vaccine, resulting in pure hilarity (to real scientists) and, unsurprisingly, an interview with America’s Quack, Mehmet Oz, on The Dr. Oz Show and an instant quack bromance. Basically, if it’s quackery and pseudoscience, very likely Adams embraces it and probably profits from selling it. More recently, Adams has become a die-hard Donald Trump supporter and a rising star in the alt-right.

In the interests of full disclosure, I must reveal the reason for my schadenfreude. First, it appears that, for unclear reasons, Google penalized NaturalNews.com today, as Len over at Telapost noticed:

Today someone asked me why they could not find a website in Google search. The website is “Natural News” (http://naturalnews.com/).

Indeed, the site has been penalized by Google. This means, for whatever reason, the site does not show up in Google organic search. I tested the subdomain blogs.naturalnews.com as well, and it too is penalized.

Len goes on to note that he’s seen sites disappear for a day or two and come back, but as of right now he noted that NaturalNews.com is definitely missing from Google Search results. I myself also did some tests and found the same thing. At least as of my writing this, NaturalNews is:

If you are not active in the world of SEO you may call it blackballed, sandboxed, blacklisted, delisted, etc. It means your website has been removed from Google’s search results. Some penalties are algorithmic, others are manual, meaning a person at Google manually penalized the website for violating Google’s webmaster guidelines.

So we don’t know why NaturalNews was penalized by Google, nor do we know if this penalization is permanent, brief, or long term, but this is serious business:

As mentioned above, this could be a fluke. Or, maybe there are a tremendous amount of bad links pointing at them- I doubt that though- the site is 10yrs old.

I googled a recent post and it had been mentioned nearly 3,000 times in just days that I could tell, which means it has likely been cited significantly more than that. That is a tremendous amount od SEO value. From what I can tell, the site should be ranking very well. But, that said, there is only so much I can tell by just glancing around. I do not have access to what I would need to determine why the penalty occurred.

This must be fairly recent as SimilarWeb estimates that 31% of their 6,500,000 monthly hits are via organic search.

When I searched for NaturalNews.com on Google, I got Adams’ Facebook page. I got a bunch of entries about Natural News, including RationalWiki’s and a couple posts by me here and at my not-so-super-secret other blog. I got a couple of domains owned by Adams and linked to NaturalNews.com, such as NewsTarget.com, Healthranger.com, and TruthWiki.org, all domains that do not appear to be affected. But I saw no direct links to NaturalNews.com. On Twitter I’ve been getting reports from the UK that Adams’ site appears to have been delisted there as well.

Late last week, I received a direct threat that warned if I did not take steps to destroy Alex Jones and InfoWars, I would be targeted for destruction in a campaign of smears, censorship and defamation.

Instead of giving in to the enemy, I refused to take the bait and went public with details of the threat, warning everyone in the new media that sinister forces were now being pursued to undermine and silence every anti-establishment (and pro-Trump) voice on the internet.

True to form, today the entire Natural News website has been blacklisted by Google, entirely without warning.

As is his usual M.O., Adams linked the delisting of his flagship website to…well, everything, including the fall of Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt right troll known for his misogyny, slurs against and outing of LGBT people, and general nastiness. Apparently, none of that was too much for conservatives who embraced him for being “politically incorrect,” but when he spoke way too blithely about pedophilia, even appearing to defend it and joke about his molestation by a priest as having taught him how to give better fellatio, that was too much and he was disinvited from speaking at this week’s CPAC conservative gathering and forced to resign from Breitbart. Of course, it was the “opposition research” and a “cynical media witch hunt” that brought him down. Then there’s InfoWars having been “blackballed” by AdRoll, thus cutting into Alex Jones’ profits. Then, of course, there were those evil liberals pummeling the Shopify e-commerce platform to dump the Breitbart online store. Then there was this:

Today, Natural News has been hit by Google, which has blacklisted the entire Natural News domain and removed over 140,000 pages from its index. The take down of Natural News happened this morning, and it follows a pattern of censorship we’re seeing being leveled against other pro-Trump websites. Google sent no warning whatsoever to our “webmaster tools” email address on file with them. The shut off of Natural News was clearly driven by a human decision, not an algorithm. We’re currently attempting to determine Google’s claimed justification for censoring our entire website, and we hope to have NaturalNews.com restored in Google’s index.

Schadenfreude feels so good. I truly enjoyed reading Adams’ rant about how you are “witnessing a modern-day book burning by the internet Gestapo that now decides what knowledge you’re never allowed to access… especially because much of that knowledge can help set humanity free.” I mean, I knew Adams was grandiose, but this is ridiculous, so much so that it’s worth quoting at more length than I normally do, so that you, too, can laugh at it without actually having to visit NaturalNews.com (although feel free to do so if you like, and tell Adams Orac sent you). Read it in all its unhinged glory:

Natural News is, of course, one of the world’s top educational and activism sources exposing the lies of dangerous medicine, toxic mercury in vaccines, the corporate-quack science behind GMOs, cancer industry fraud and so on. By providing truthful, empowering and passionate information to the public, we harm the profit model of the corrupt medical cartels that fund the media, lobby the government and influence internet gatekeepers with advertising money. (Google has already declared war on natural medicine and nutritional supplements, all but banning them from being advertised on Google Adsense.)

The removal of Natural News from Google’s index means that millions of people may now be unnecessarily harmed by toxic medicines, herbicides and brain-damaging mercury in vaccines because they are being denied the “other side of the story” that’s censored by the corporate-controlled media. By censoring Natural News, Google is, in effect, siding with the criminal pharmaceutical industry that has been charged with multiple felony crimes and caught bribing doctors, fraudulently altering scientific studies, conducting medical experiments on children and price fixing their drugs to maximize profits.

In effect, censorship of Natural News is part of the establishment’s war on humanity which includes depopulation measures (Bill Gates), covert infertility vaccines, corporate-run media disinfo campaigns and a full-on assault against scientific truth and free speech conducted in the public interest.

Won’t someone think of the children? Not surprisingly, the almost as quacky Jon Rappoport is standing behind Mike Adams in his hour of need. Of course, Adams will look very silly if this was just a glitch and his site is relisted tomorrow. I’m hoping that doesn’t happen, but how Google operates is the very blackest of black boxes. Who knows what happened. I’m hoping the delisting sticks but fearing it won’t.

In any case, Adams is either really delusional or thinks incredibly little of his readers if he can say with a straight face that Natural News is one of the worlds “top educational and activism sources.” In reality, it is, as I said above, the wretchedest of wretched hives of scum and quackery, now seasoned with alt right, Trump-worshiping misogyny, racism, bigotry against transgendered people, and general right wing batshit nuttiness. Even more hilarious is his claim that “millions of people” might now be harmed by the evil toxins, vaccines, herbicides, and everything else Adams likes to rant about.

I have to wonder, naturally, whether Google’s decision to delist NaturalNews.com is part of its attempt to clean up fake news. To be honest, as much as I despise Adams and his website, I’m not sure that NaturalNews.com qualifies as fake news. Adams rarely makes up stories out of whole cloth. Rather, like every good propagandist he takes existing news stories and information sources, cherry picks from them, and then weaves them together into a deceptive, biased tale designed to rile up his readers by confirming their conspiracy theories, all while misrepresenting science and evidence to fuel his quackery-supporting narratives. That’s why I don’t really consider NaturalNews.com to be a fake news site, but more like a whackaloon conspiracy theory and quackery website. I realize that that could be a distinction without a true difference.

On the other hand, it’s a fine line between what Adams does and fake news; I’m not always sure where I’d draw it. Even so, there’s no doubt that Adams’ website had serious Google juice, given all the citations, incoming links, and, these days above all, the social media shares, all coupled with a lot of traffic and reach. And that was a problem. His “fake medicine” and conspiracy theory articles were very widely shared on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, and Adams has been very SEO-, social media-, and web-savvy for a very long time. His ridiculous articles promoting ridiculous conspiracy theories (that is, when he wasn’t gloating over the deaths of celebrities who used conventional medicine to treat their cancer), had a wide reach and were not infrequently shared by people on Facebook who really should know better. Since he went all in for Donald Trump, his reach has only grown, as he has become a rising star in the alt right.

Like the alt right, he’s very good at playing the martyr, persecuted in this case for…well, just read:

It’s clear to me that Natural News is being targeted primarily because of our support for President Trump and his review of vaccine safety. It is now apparent that any person who engages in real science, critical thinking or any attempt to protect children from the brain damaging effects of mercury in vaccines is going to be silenced, discredited, smeared and blacklisted. This is an astonishing realization about the depths of total corruption in society today and how the medical cartels control information to maximize their profits off human suffering.

I am, however, very much enjoying my schadenfreude, and will continue to do so as long as Adams’ site is delisted and he continues his tirades against Google and his victimhood conspiracies. I just started listening to Adams’ podcast about the whole thing:

I’m sorry, I had to stop when Adams started to brag about how NaturalNews.com is true journalism that cites all its sources and does in-depth analysis. I couldn’t stop laughing.

I wonder if Adams knows what he did and is shouting conspiracy in spite of knowing better, of he really doesn’t know and sincerely believes he was targeted by “the man”.

His entire career for the last two decades is built on scamming and grifting. It seems unlikely that he has been innocently exploiting a loophole in the Goofle ranking algorithms in order to raise his profile, and is now genuinely bewildered and aggrieved because the loophole closed. I suspect that Adams is now all butthurt and victimhood because that’s what professional grifters do in these days of personal-responsibility-for-poor-people-only (viz Milo Y.).

[…] supporting Natural News has joined the mix, calling this an attack on Natural News. The more level-headed and reasonable perspective of Orac, over on Science Blogs has focussed on the fact that we really have no idea why Natural News was […]

Late last week, I received a direct threat that warned if I did not take steps to destroy Alex Jones and InfoWars, I would be targeted for destruction in a campaign of smears, censorship and defamation.

I guess that subjects the whole “always packin’ heat,” ah, thing to quite an icy shower.

Wasn’t everyone supposed to be using GoodGopher, his own proprietary front-end alternative, by now?

It’s too bad that he’s not businessman enough to see this as an opportunity to sell crank- dynamo-powered appliances to keep his marks in contact. The bandwidth of packet radio or moonbounce might limit certain core functionality, of course.

when [Milo Yiannopoulos] spoke way too blithely about pedophilia, even appearing to defend it, that was too much

More advocating than ‘defending’. I think he was really attacking the quaint outmoded concept of “consent’, and trying to portray age of consent laws as just another example of liberal tyranny. Pandering to his audience.

It might also possible that Google delisted him due to malvertisement on his site, which has increased massively of late.
Malware being sent by an advertisement, advertised by one of the various ad sites used by many a webmaster and is currently being cracked down upon by Google and other search engine (and ad websites) owners.
Currently, a napkin estimate has been around one hundred fold increase in such malvertisements.
I’m both seeing this individually on various websites *and* in signature sets sent by NIPS/NIDS service providers over just this past month.
The crap has gone very seriously and badly off of the wire in that score. Added, ad sites that hijack the host page, shooting one straight to the targeted video ad, which is something witnessed just within the past 24 hours.

Oh, that was definitely my first suspicion. Adams could very well have been doing something Google doesn’t like to game his SEO and Google finally noticed. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if that’s what happened.

It’s nice to see that Google and Yahoo in Canada have also dropped (UN)naturalNews.com. For amusements sake, I checked out eh original evil (Bing) and the site is the first hit. The same applies to duckduckgo.com. Would have been so much sweeter if the site had of been wiped from all the major search engines. Oh well. Let the lies and stupidity propagate.

Also possible that they had a plan to give a more minor penalty to sites that continue to publish debunked info and it went a little haywire. That’s what we need to push all on the quack sites down in the rankings for real medical and science search terms.

Sadly, instead of expressing solidarity, Adams’ cohorts in med-woo seem to be ignoring his victimization by the Google Conspiracy. For instance, Mercola is going his merry way, while Dr. Oz is concentrating on “teatoxing”.

“Naturopathic doctor Pina Logiudice explains how teatoxing at home can help you slim down and reduce bloat and water weight.”

How can these guys ignore a threat the laps at the very foundation of our liberty and threatens impending global depopulation??!?!?!?

Are you really THAT noaive? Yes, it’s the same thing. Glad Google is finally throwing out the trash. “I have to wonder, naturally, whether Google’s decision to delist NaturalNews.com is part of its attempt to clean up fake news. To be honest, as much as I despise Adams and his website, I’m not sure that NaturalNews.com qualifies as fake news. Adams rarely makes up stories out of whole cloth. Rather, like every good propagandist he takes existing news stories and information sources, cherry picks from them, and then weaves them together into a deceptive, biased tale designed to rile up his readers by confirming their conspiracy theories, all while misrepresenting science and evidence to fuel his quackery-supporting narratives. That’s why I don’t really consider NaturalNews.com to be a fake news site, but more like a whackaloon conspiracy theory and quackery website. I realize that that could be a distinction without a true difference.”

As much as I detest Naturalnews.com and Mike Adams, I feel shocked, scared, and not one bit surprised. This is a warning to ALL OF US.

We have put our intellectual freedom in the hands of a private company that DOES NOT have our best interests at heart. Intellectual freedom, unlike free speech, is freedom of expression given by a private entity. Google can provide it or not, at its pleasure.

Intellectual freedom given or not given by Google matters because for many users it is THE ONLY search engine and many don’t know how to use a locator bar or bookmarks. They have the Google pages as their home page, and the Google search box is their locator bar. Delisting from Google can mean your site disappears.

This means not only loyal fans and readers of Mike Adams’ swill can’t reach him unless they know the base URL and have ten nimble fingers, and are on a device with a reasonable keyboard, but also critics of quackery and students studying quackery (Adam’s work is primary source for that subject) also have a tougher time accessing him.

Google should not decide who gets to easily access what, but they do. What worries me this morning is who is next.

What Mike Adams should be doing is teaching his users about other search engines. Yahoo (Formerly Altavista) and Bing, are mainstream search engines that may or may not follow Google’s suit. Qrobe.it is a meta search engine with enhanced privacy, and my go-to engine. Then there is always the locator bar. Nearly all browsers have one, even mobile browsers. Nearly all browsers have bookmarks. Touch typing is a wonderful skill. Alas, he is wasting a good, teachable moment.

As for the rest of us, any of us can be next, since we have no idea how Google operates. Keep those ten wiggling fingers nimble even on a mobile keyboard.

@27/Eric Lund: Not quite; Milo was the “live boy”, as you put it; what happened was he spoke positively of his own molestation at 17 by an older priest and was defending other gay males having such relationships. Still very gross (and honestly a little saddening), but he wasn’t the adult in the personal situation he was defending.

Though Google does exist on the corporate plane, with no Official Governmental Authority (well, not counting certain functional overlaps with NSA), its role as gatekeeper does lend it a basic regulatory function.

While I know of nothing positive at all to say about Adams, this particular shutdown could, in other circumstances, be turned against others – even the Respectfully Insolent. Let’s say a respectable site (e.g., mayoclinic.org) gets hit with a malware infestation &/or a big malpractice suit &/or a major PR goof – could they be erased from search results? Could the Trump/Sessions Justice Dept get a court order to delist an operation they consider Fake News®?

A few years ago, some spam-meisters apparently raided an address list from a relatively minor ISP (which I happen to use) and started a spate of obnoxious emails spoofing addresses from that domain. AT&T noticed – and for a while, none of my personal emails could get through to anyone using an AT&T account. That got cleared up, eventually, somehow (not having an AT&T account, I never could reach anybody within that customers-only! organization to register a complaint), but it did sensitize me to the power of arbitrary Internet blockage and its potential abuse.

Home page comes up for me fine today. I suspect that Adams is getting jumpy because he knows that, if not now then soon, Google will manually tweak the algorithms in ways that will be very damaging to his profits.

Although clicks for most of his products will be very low value, a few cents mostly, he will watch the data very very closely. Occasionally there can be drop-outs for no explicable reason, but it’s highly unlikely that the entire site would be “blacklisted”.

The whole “alternative fact” thing that Trump has set off is bound to lead to a lot of money being spent on the credibility of search technologies, meaning that a site like Adams’ will still be there, but his material being downranked to index pages that nobody ever reaches with standard keyword searches.

I do quite love that Mikey goes straight to the conspiracy, there is nothing else that could possibly be happening. I suppose that does whip up his followers more than a post describing the more mundane reasons this type of thing happens.

But I also would not at all be surprised if it turns out he was playing some SEO games which Google’s system did not like, and found himself penalized.

While I know of nothing positive at all to say about Adams, this particular shutdown could, in other circumstances, be turned against others – even the Respectfully Insolent. Let’s say a respectable site (e.g., mayoclinic.org) gets hit with a malware infestation &/or a big malpractice suit &/or a major PR goof – could they be erased from search results? Could the Trump/Sessions Justice Dept get a court order to delist an operation they consider Fake News®?

These are good questions. We know (and Orac has posted on this subject in the past) that anti-vaxers have gamed the Facebook abuse reporting system to silence their critics. Somebody could figure out how to game Google’s system to get sites they don’t like delisted. Google’s algorithms have been gamed in the past (most famously, the group of left-wing bloggers who successfully conspired to make then-President George W. Bush’s official White House bio the top result of a search for “miserable failure”). We know that Google will tweak their algorithm once they figure out how people are gaming it, but it will take time to identify and fix such problems.

I would not worry about the government here. The First Amendment rules against prior restraint do reply to them, and more importantly, there are precedents for allowing fake news as free speech (specifically, Fox News).

Considering he promotes his own search engine which conveniently strips out science or evidence based sites, I really have zero sympathy.

I have no idea why his site got delisted but I suspect it was less to do with fake news and more to do with whatever shady advertising, SEO tactics or other sleaze he was pulling off to elevate his site in the google rankings.

It is shocking to see how many Americans (I presume most of you must be) have such a low information quotient. Amerika has become an echo chamber of sheep, bleating for more toxic food, more toxic pharma, more enslavement. You people really need to expand your reading lists and get with the human program.

I expect the original site and all its glorious articles to be listed again before long, as whatever was pissing off the Lords of Google will be resolved and they will have deemed Adams to have learned his lesson (the NN take will be that Google privileges were restored due to protestations of the outraged citizenry, but Evil remains a dire threat (and buy my supplements)).

More advocating than ‘defending’. I think he was really attacking the quaint outmoded concept of “consent’, and trying to portray age of consent laws as just another example of liberal tyranny. Pandering to his audience.

Not to defend Milo in any way, but I personally don’t think it’s necessarily impossible for there to be a consensual relationship between a teenager and an older man. One of my best friends had his first serious relationship when he was 16 with a guy in his late 20s, and it was totally mutual and consensual.

The shut-down of NN’S indexing, if intentional, is censorship. The “fake news” meme was spun by moneyed corporate interests to justify exactly that – censorship.
It span out of control when the alternative media turned it around and used the term against the “real media”‘. Now Trump is using it against them, and rightly so in many cases. Now things are going into a higher gear. Corporate interests are pulling out the stops.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, ad companies can shut down Natural News, Infowars, Breitbart etc because they control the network element of the internet.
And yes, of course it’s a conspiracy.
How would they shut down Trump? Political ouster conspiracy?
Bullet?
Interesting times. Let’s hope reason and logic prevail, not emotion.

wtf is wrong with this site. Science? Really? Or are you just media shills. Rather than giving a flying fuck about freedom of speech and the press, you have bowed down to slave masters and are now part of the garbage infesting the planet. Did you get a promise of “peerage” or simply to be left alone and ALLOWED to continue your pablum postings? Hmmm?

Home page comes up for me fine today. I suspect that Adams is getting jumpy because he knows that, if not now then soon, Google will manually tweak the algorithms in ways that will be very damaging to his profits.

Well, yes. The website is still up. The NaturalNews.com domain is just delisted in Google. No Google search results will return any links within that domain.

I just did the experiment myself. Safari v. 10.0.3 under MacOS 10.10.5 (Yosemite), in case anyone reading cares about such details.

The autosuggestion feature in Safari (which is independent of Google) suggested Mike’s real site. But it’s not there in the Google search results, at least not on the first page. Result #1 is the mirror site Mike set up. This blog post is #4.

On further consideration: This probably accounts for the influx of nyms we haven’t seen before. Quite possibly, Mike and friends are encouraging his peeps to do exactly that Google search and give people like Orac a piece of their minds. Or perhaps they are coming up with that idea independently.

Let’s say a respectable site (e.g., mayoclinic.org) gets hit with a malware infestation &/or a big malpractice suit &/or a major PR goof – could they be erased from search results?

I think that might not be a terrible thing. If mayoclinic.org got hit with a serious malware infestation, temporarily delisting it could be a good way of limiting the damage. Just because we might consider the Mayo Clinic one of the “the good guys” most of the time does not mean it shouldn’t be quarantined if it becomes a risk. That’d obviously a be a seriously big deal, but it’s something to think about. We all know large, legitimate organizations are not invulnerable to hackers.

Taken to another extreme, it’s as if Mikey has all along been playing by the rules of Russian cyberpropaganda: “it is often not even seeking to be believed. Instead, it has as one aim undermining the notion of objective truth and reporting being possible at all”.

I think that might not be a terrible thing. If mayoclinic.org got hit with a serious malware infestation, temporarily delisting it could be a good way of limiting the damage.

G—le has already sort of done that, with the “this site may harm your computer” warning, which I imagine tends to put a good number of people off proceeding (and has generated whining in and of itself).

Well, for years he’s been saying how g–gle et al are *hopelessly* biased towards the lamestream ™ so perhaps he’ll find a way to direct his thralls towards his own alternative.

Seriously.

Over the past 2 years, he’s been shilling his own news sites and fetch engine.

Although I can barely keep count, hasn’t he attempted to launch various enterprises, sites, businesses, cons etc over the years? IIRC, he tried real estate in Ecuador, franchises for food products like NZ green lipped mussels or suchlike, survivalist gear, a social media site, 3D printing, home farms … on and on.

In similar fashion, the Nullmacher has INSISTED that’ he’s a victim of cyberwar and CIA intervention because of the *dangerous* material he discusses and posts on his prn site.
He is a threat to the government and mainstream.
He’s always being hacked like Sharyl Atkisson.

I suppose that it may be a measure of a brave rebel’s value to the resistance:
if the powers-that-be fear him and take action against him, he must [email protected] rule.

One of the reasons I survey these fellows ( and gals) beyond informing others of their nonsense is because their hijinks and inept posturibgs anbd raaaamblings amuse me endlessly.

I have it on good authority that Natural News was penalized by Google for a “sneaky mobile redirect” that broke their terms and conditions. This happens to a lot of sites. All Mike Adams has to do is fix it and file a reconsideration request to Google and it is all fixed. I will come back and post a link to a story on this when its posted.

It will be interesting to see if he does that, as it will not play into his conspiracy narrative.

If and when our Google Masters explain that they are targeting Fake News sites and delisting those that do not contribute to educated discourse, THEN we can wave our civil liberty banners and raise hell.

To do so now would look silly if it turned out that the NN delisting was for some form of SEO misbehavior.

“Anyone who applauds this move by Google is an enemy of Democracy. I really find it hard to believe a “Science Blog” would be cheering this on.”

Enjoying a good laugh at the expense of Mike Adams and his bizarrely over-the-top conspiracy theorizing is hardly a threat to our democratic way of life.

“Did you get a promise of “peerage” or simply to be left alone and ALLOWED to continue your pablum postings?”

We don’t need no steenking titles, as long as those shill buck$ keep arriving on schedule every month.

Someone ( not me) who is good at photoshopping needs to put Mikey’s face on a Renaissance image of the martyr, St Sebastian ( although I venture that the saint was in much better shape and looked better partially nude).

Sorry, I died not check post before posting – that “I’m no fan of Natural News and have mocked it myself. That said, this is a chilling development.” was not from me, it was copied from @Tom Siebert above.

Google have been removing sites from their search engine for years. They do it to any site that breaks their Webmaster Guidelines. That is all this is about, Natural News broke those Guidelines.

Really, there is nothing there that is at all surprising. Google is the “Ministry of Peace,” this is Communist China style censorship, etc.

He says that perhaps NaturalNews will become even more popular if people hear that it’s “censored” (censorship, I do not think that word means what you think it means), and will wonder: Oooooh, what kind of dangerous (ooo-wee-ooo, also, hints of Milo) information is this that Google doesn’t want me to see? Wow, better tell my friends about it too!

But there’s probably no need to waste your time, it’s not all that interesting.

All Mike Adams has to do is fix it and file a reconsideration request to Google and it is all fixed

But Mikey’s business model depends on using the sneaky redirects to bring traffic to his products, relying on the rigged Goofle hits to advertise them as something else. Can he afford to fix his redirection scam?

needs to put Mikey’s face on a Renaissance image of the martyr, St Sebastian
Indeed.

Not only was St Sebastian middle-aged and butch, he wasn’t killed with arrows. Punctured, yes, but not killed. The perforated martyr was rescued from the stake and nursed back to health by St Irene of Rome – a woman, boys – before unwisely haranguing Diocletian for his paganism as he passed by on a litter. Unmoved by his tenacity, the emperor had Sebastian clubbed to death; his body was then dumped in Rome’s sewers. Had history been less kind, he might have ended up as patron saint of poo.

Guido Reni painted 7 or 8 versions of Sebastian, and there are many times that number of cheap copies of Reni’s versions, by later painters.. One of these days I plan to string them together into a jerky animated movie.

On the other hand, it’s a fine line between what Adams does and fake news; I’m not always sure where I’d draw it.

Sad fact about freedom of speech is that lying is literally a protected right. Technically, fake news is protected the same way fiction is protected –there is no constitutional allowance stipulating that posted news reports must be true. Where would the National Enquirer be if there were laws about this?

I think we’re seeing some watershed events taking place these days revolving around what freedom of speech actually involves with regard to the penetration of information technology into our culture. For the United States, specifically, our democratic republic style of government depends on the fidelity of common voters being able to make a certain statistical frequency of good choices about things they don’t necessarily understand. If people in their schooling more frequently fail to gain a capacity to filter information sources for good sources and also more frequently overestimate their own capacity to make good judgements about topics on which they are not expert, we’re liable to see increasing problems down the line in the fundamental veracity of self-governance –if we’re not seeing such problems already, which I would contend we are! Some censorship, by companies like Google or by government, where the decision is kept out of the hands of uninformed laymen, may become fundamentally necessary just to insure social order.

I think for freedom to continue to exist…. any freedom… you have to have respect for and understanding of the fundamental responsibilities for maintaining a functioning collective society despite what degrees of personal diversity any particular freedom allows. I think new laws always get written when people don’t understand this. And especially since these responsibilities are actually always changing as we learn more about the world around us and as our civilization gets more populous and has no choice to alter how we interact with the world around us. Technically, science is the buffer by which any quality judgments happen and if science is politicized or lines of information become corrupt, it pretty much assures that nobody can make right choices about what a democratic government should do.

That intrigued me. Does Namma believe that the NWO and / or the Illuminati intend to reinstitute a system of aristocratic titles? Is this part of the wider alt-facts belief system?

TRUFAX: The Frau Doktorin’s mother used to call me ‘Prince’ in her final, rather confused years. I never figured out whether she believed me to be a minor member of the Danish royal family, or just an Alsatian dog.

Why can’t people be allowed to make up their own mind? I dont think censorship of differing opinions is helpful. Idk what this guy is selling or pushing but as long as it’s not illegal let it go. Jeez. What I hate is people trying to tell me what I can and can’t do.

@cheryl herritt – they were breaking Google’s Webmaster guidelines. They were doing things that were artificially increasing their rankings by some manipulative technique. Google does not like it when sites try to manipulate their rankings. It was not about fake news or censorship.

The stench of the sheep manure is so strong here! I like Mike Adams and Natural News. Its the horrendous storm of snowflakes, helped and supported by the MLM. The MLM has more interest in seeing where emotionally and confused transgenders take a SH*# THEY ARE THE PUBLISHERS OF FAKE NEWS TO POLITICALLY sway the opinion of people who have no critical thinking abilities. BAHA Bahaaa that’s why they are sheep. Now go to your safe zones and grab a little pony and cry. Because TRUMP IS PRESIDENT. FAIR AND SQUARE, get over it! Support free speech! Not China intranet policies

I do believe a link to this post must have been posted to a Facebook page or other social media site where there are a lot of Mike Adams and/or Donald Trump fans. Will TS try to sneak in here hidden among the newbies? Be vigilant, my friends. Be vigilant.

Too much name calling here … too much stupidity here as well. You’re so afraid of him that you have to resort to childishness, just like all the snowflakes that do nothing but hate this, that or the other thing. YOU are the ridiculous ones, not Mike Adams. He might not be ALL he purports himself to be, but he’s an honest man that stands miles above the likes of you. There’s too much hate abounding these days, and Mike isn’t the one perpetuating it. He’d be very happy if all of you twinkies would just shut up and get on with your lives. But, oh yeah, you can’t do that because YOU DON’T HAVE A LIFE!! Nor do you want one … too much responsibility … way to hard without mommy and daddy.

for those who think that Google is a private corporation, you’re wrong, its a publically traded company, and it is more than 51% owned by Government hedge funds, so yes, this is technically censorship.

Science blog can spout that vaccines are perfectly safe and don’t cause autism, and call naturalnews a quack website, but its just an opinion. There is plenty of scientific evidence now, thanks to CDC research scientist whistleblowers who released the buried research from the 90’s that the MMR vaccine can in fact cause autism in a certain segment of the population. this isn’t a conspiracy, its fact. and the fact that the CDC itself owns 75% of all vaccine patents, means they have a biased agenda, and actual motive to suppress this data.

go ahead, take the time to educate yourself, watch the documentary VAXXED, it will open your eyes.

Mike Adams, good greif where did he take writing lessons? The quotes bits of his post remind me strongly of the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs (of John Carter of Mars/Barsoom and Tarzan fame), which is to say overwrought in the extreme. Which is fine when you’re writing a serial about fantasy Mars, but maybe a bit much for a blog post about how Google is after you.

And I want to point out this quote specifically “anti-establishment (and pro-Trump) “. Uh, dude, Mike, in case you haven’t noticed Trump *won*. He is, by definition, the establishment, no matter how anyone feels about it.

@Shawn
“de-listing a registered domain is not what a search engine should be doing.’

Google do this 100’s of times a day.
They only do it to those sites that use manipulative techniques to artificially increase their rankings in the search results. That affects the quality of Google’s search results; so they take action.

Lawrence @ # 95: … Google has no obligation to list any website on their search engine…

Dunno if this has been tested legally (and, IANAL), but if you operate a service that claims to search the entire Web – and it doesn’t – does that open up a potential liability for fraud or misleading advertisement?

Nothing screams “honest man” like using manipulative web development practices. If it was sneaky redirects, or other techniques like cloaking or link schemes to increase pagerank, then sorry, it is hard to feel bad about Google delisting the site. I do hope more details emerge at some point.

if you operate a service that claims to search the entire Web
No-one makes that claim.

Why can’t people be allowed to make up their own mind? I dont think censorship of differing opinions

I take it that none of Mikey’s defenders are using his GoodGopher “search engine” / indexing service, which explicitly promises to filter out dissonant facts and leave its users in a safe unchallenged bubble.

I wonder again, why is Mikey so upset when his own search service is so much better and more popular than the evil Gazoogle?

Hattie @120: You said ” Big Food (and cultural eating habits) ” which makes me think you haven’t actually read very many posts on RI or ScienceBlogs in general because in general nutrition isn’t a topic here much. We might have a comments seciton devolve to a conversation about food, but that’s very different from talking about nutrition.

Also, you might want to try checking out the non-biology ScienceBlogs. There’s archaeology and astronomy and astrophysics, which is having a really big day with the discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 system.

I am wondering if Hattie might be making a bit of a joke and mimicking the form of the average Natural News support who drops by here. I mean, they got the joke about echo chambers, and that implies a sense of humour I rarely see by Mikey’s pals.

The most surprising thing about this blog is that the comments do not appear to be being censored. Good to see. But then I guess this is a blog, not a “news organisation” website.
We in the mainstream media in Noo Zillund censor reader comments all the time. It’s actually pretty funny listening to the newsroom comments moderators whispering conspiratorially about reader comments they are not letting slip through the net. Sometimes they do so by mistake with something a little too incisive, and there is hell to pay. We’re pretty precious with their narratives. They’re investments, you see.
I’ve also worked alongside intelligence officers in newsrooms (Operation Mockingbird, Noo Zillund style), so there’s that.
Critical thinking and research are key to forming an informed opinion on anything. In order to get to that place you need the mainstream narratives and the dissenting ones. The truth, so far as you can get to it, lies in the middle somewhere. Censorship is not your friend in getting to that place of truth.
Finally folks have pointed out about that Google is a private corporation (and by extension has no duty to protect the US first amendment). That would only change probably if Google was shown to have partner or investment involvement with US state intelligence agencies where public funds have been expended and aided the business.
Mmm, could be a story there…

Mike Adams may not be perfect and some of his writers may be a bit flaky, but there is some truth to what they write.

Can you provide examples of worthwhile content at NaturalNews? I am genuinely curious. Also I am very keen on avoiding work at the moment.

These people aren’t skeptics, the are pseudoskeptics guilty of logical fallacies.

I am guessing that you are getting your information on Scienceblogs, our host, and the skeptic movement writ large from sources like Mike Adams. These sources leave something to be desired.

Incidentally, I am not the world’s biggest fan of Monsanto, but that is because I’m an anti-capitalist in general. I don’t think they’re any better or worse than any other corporation; corporations are generally amoral and profit-driven, that’s how they work.

Wasn’t it Natural News that was redirecting any link that came in from here back to a generic landing page? I have memories of people in here commenting that if they clicked on links from RI they got redirected; but if they copied the link and put it in manually, then they got to the actual page that was being quoted.

So the idea that he might be using deliberately deceptive redirects is not at all surprising, and as the Google page linked above notes, the reason Google clamps down on this is to make sure that the quoted page summary actually matches the page people will see when they click.

(While I’m not entirely happy with just how black Google’s black box is, I can fully understand why. Any set of rules they can enumerate would be gamed by people trying to cheat the system. Natural News with all its various sites linking to each other is already an attempt at making itself look better to the original Google ‘pagerank’ algorithm which prioritized sites that were cited with outside links.)

He was and still is redirecting links from RationalWiki to a specific landing page
I do not know about other sites.
That is a deceptive practice; ie you click on a link expecting one thing and get another — that is not a positive user experience.
That is not necessarily a Google issue, but if they did that, then they are certainly capable of doing things that did break the terms and conditions that google have

Wasn’t it Natural News that was redirecting any link that came in from here back to a generic landing page? I have memories of people in here commenting that if they clicked on links from RI they got redirected; but if they copied the link and put it in manually, then they got to the actual page that was being quoted

Indeed he was, bu Google doesn’t care about this. What he was also doing was the same thing from Google searches. So instead of getting the page you clicked on, you would be redirected to another page on his website.

The most surprising thing about this blog is that the comments do not appear to be being censored. Good to see. But then I guess this is a blog, not a “news organisation” website.
We in the mainstream media in Noo Zillund censor reader comments all the time. It’s actually pretty funny listening to the newsroom comments moderators whispering conspiratorially about reader comments they are not letting slip through the net. Sometimes they do so by mistake with something a little too incisive, and there is hell to pay. We’re pretty precious with our narratives. They’re investments, you see.
I’ve also worked alongside intelligence officers in newsrooms (Operation Mockingbird, Noo Zillund style), so there’s that.
Critical thinking and research are key to forming an informed opinion on anything. In order to get to that place you need the mainstream narratives and the dissenting ones. The truth, so far as you can get to it, lies in the middle somewhere. Censorship is not your friend in getting to that place of truth.
Finally folks have pointed out about that Google is a private corporation (and by extension has no duty to protect the US first amendment). That would only change probably if Google was shown to have partner or investment involvement with US state intelligence agencies where public funds have been expended and aided the business.
Mmm, could be a story there…

Guy @135: You said “The truth, so far as you can get to it, lies in the middle somewhere.” That might be true of people and opinions and politics, but the earth is generally spherical, regardless of what the Flat Earth Society says, so the “truth” is not that the Earth is a frisbee.

Be careful what you write JustaTech, inattentive readers might think I’m a flat earther and discount my analysis with a broad brush (I’m not a flat earther lol :-))
The middle I’m referring to is your consciousness (or mine, or anyone’s) with critical thinking engaged. You weigh up the facts and narratives on an issue as you know them and reach a conclusion.
This is an important skill to have and to exercise. If censorship goes ahead in the US and the rest of the world, your ability to reach a valid conclusion on anything will be negated.
Take China, which has active internet censorship. The Chinese who visit Noo Zillund generally have no idea what Falun Gong is (it’s basically yoga, if you don’t know either) nor that that its practitioners in China are systematically imprisoned and reportedly executed with their organs sold for transplants. I don’t know what the truth is in this matter myself, but I’m sure I’m a lot closer to getting to it than the average Chinese.

The following illustrates that fake news has infiltrated the highest levels of scientifically respectable journalism. We need dissident voices. Now is not the time for any kind of censorship whatsoever:
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”
— Dr. Marcia Angell, 2009 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption/

“The case against science is straightforward: Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, â€œpoor methods get resultsâ€. The Academy of Medical Sciences, Medical Research Council, and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council have now put their reputational weight behind an investigation into these questionable research practices. The apparent endemicity [i.e. pervasiveness within the scientific culture] of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of â€œsignificanceâ€ pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale. We reject important confirmations. Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent, endpoints that foster reductive metrics, such as high-impact publication. National assessment procedures, such as the Research Excellence Framework, incentivise bad practices. And individual scientists, including their most senior leaders, do little to alter a research culture that occasionally veers close to misconduct.”
— Richard Horton, editor in chief of Lancet http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2960696-1.pdf

Never figured that they would. My point was more that if he was known to be actively doing this sort of thing for at least one site, it demonstrated both the capability and willingness to do it elsewhere.

Could you supply some suggestions? I have been experimenting with a lot of Chinese and Indian dishes and I am not all that sure about dill.

It is a favorite herb in Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian kitchens and goes in just about anything/everything. Soups (especially cold soups like chlodnik, yum), salads (cucumber salad, potato salad, “vinegret,” “olivye,” etc.). And on and on. It is also very nice with pickles and as an ingredient in lox, but don’t tell Narad. 🙂

@143 – I used to live with a Polish woman … dill really does go in/with anything.

Last autumn my girlfriend came from Japan to visit me in the UK. I was surprised to learn that she had never seen/heard of dill (should not have been really, I’ve never seen it in Japan). She quite liked the flavour and aroma, but I fear it will be a mostly dill free life for us. We will live somehow … I guess 🙁

Bob; they only delist those sites who do deliberate things to try and artificially manipulate the search results to get a better ranking for their site than they should have naturally. This is all that has happened to Mike Adams. Google does it to 100’s of sites daily and has been doing it for years. They do it to protect the integrity of their search results from the spammers.

Mike Adams can fix this very quickly if he wants to. However, claiming conspiracies etc fits into his narrative.There is no conspiracy.

Yep. I sort of had my suspicion with the first comment, but for some reason I let it slide. I should listen to that little warning bell that goes off in my head when I see a comment like that. It’s also virtually assured that at least one of our other newbies is also a Travis sock. Stay frosty.

We’ll also soon see if my suspicions about a couple of other newbies are correct. 🙂

I haven’t been commenting here much lately, and not read a ton of comments, so I have not seen this Travis sock. I hope, in the very least, they were not using my gravatar, and just happened to use the same name.

She quite liked the flavour and aroma, but I fear it will be a mostly dill free life for us. We will live somehow … I guess ?

Tonight we’re having roasted Fibonacci sequence and leftover meatloaf. The only dill is in the homemade buttermilk ranch for the salad, but if Narad were here, he could have jarred bleu cheese dressing or raspberry vinaigrette instead.

SUPPORT NATURAL NEWS and Mike Adams NOT CHINA INTRANET POLICIES that are seeping in the USA

I’m reminded of when the AoA commentariat was freaking out about “Net neutrality,” because, see, it was the government, and Big pHARMa obviously is the FCC’s puppet master. Otherwise, they would have banned DTC advertising in tthe name of Freedom.

I doubt that these true believers are capable of coming up with independent ideas.

I can only imagine the hysterical shrieking if this recent lot figured out that whole DNS thing. Oh, and is it “censorship” that Typepad* blocks Tor exit nodes, among other addresses, from so much as reading sites?

Update: Mikey has now launched a petition to the White House whining about teh Googlez:

With this petition, we hope to alert President Trump to the extremely disturbing truth that Google is deliberately and maliciously censoring pro-Trump independent journalism websites in order to silence them.

More:

NaturalNews.com serves millions of readers every month with valuable, sourced and honest content from a truly independent publisher that isn’t controlled by corrupt corporations or government. In fact, independent publishers like Natural News represent the only remaining “free press” in America. (The corporate-run media is nothing but public relations for statism.)

Again, Mikey doesn’t seem to get that Trump is the government now. And the government is, y’know… the state.

“…the wretchedest of wretched hives of scum and quackery”…as written in the fake news story above, would be better in describing the last 8 years of those in the White House, and the MSM, then and now. This story above, is full of lies Such an obvious leftist Communist hit piece. I guess no matter how low they go, they will always find a way to go much lower. Just wish they’d go to N.Korea where they would be much more comfortable and feel right at home, and quit trying to take America down with them.

Let’s see now.
Denial of reality? Check.
Claiming that for profit news organizations are somehow communist? Check.
Calling those who one disagrees with politically communist? Check.
Wanting anyone one disagrees with to leave their homes and move to a dictatorship? Check.

Sounds more like you’d fit in in North Korea than anyone who disagrees with you would.
And worse, this veteran, who completely disagrees with every thing that you just wrote isn’t leaving the nation he spent nearly three decades of his life in military defense of.

So, do feel free to kiss my arse in Macy’s window during the New Year’s Day parade.

“I wonder what Mikey will have to say when that purge and coup attempt never happen.”
I don’t. It will run something like this: “Because I and my readers/supporters/flying monkeys bravely stood up against Google’s fascistic censorship, we have warded off the purge I warned against.” Or something along that line.

MJD says MJD says: “In my opinion, if a person accepts at least one vaccine, or allows their child to receive at least one vaccine, they can not be labeled “anti-vaccine” or an “antivaxxer””
It is not generally well known but is nonetheless true that Hermann Göring saved his favorite Jew from extermination. I propose therefore that he was not an anti-Semite.

MJD says MJD says: “In my opinion, if a person accepts at least one vaccine, or allows their child to receive at least one vaccine, they can not be labeled “anti-vaccine” or an “antivaxxer””
It is not generally well known but is nonetheless true that Hermann Göring saved his favorite Jew from extermination. I propose therefore that he can not be labeled an anti-Semite.

Let’s review that claim, 300k deaths per year from medical errors.
There are 320 million people in the country, where are the emptied out towns, where everyone died of malpractice?
Where are all of the new cemeteries, as the old ones overflowed?

When did a search engine company become a national government? When was the site taken offline? When were the site’s servers confiscated?

The answer to all of those questions is one word: Never.
A private company has terms of service, if those terms are violated, as outlined in this blog, that company can and will remove the offending site from their registry to protect their own reputation.

Google is not a government. The site is still online and trivially found in less reputable search engines.
Come yell about censorship when Trump orders a site offline and it is taken offline. Until then, it isn’t censorship, it’s protecting a company’s reputation.

The whole purpose of free speech is so you can identify the crazy people. And never be so arrogant as to think that the crazy person is 100% for certain crazy.

Ignaz Semmelweis was a lunatic doctor who advocated washings hands before handling patients because he believed that tiny organisms caused illness. He was put into a mental asylum where he was beaten to death.

I’m not saying this is an equivalent case, but anybody should be allowed to say anything. Censorship is always a bad thing, without exception – even when what is being censored is wrong. Censoring an incorrect opinion gives credence to it. Has Google explained why they have done this? The people who follow the site assume it’s because of big pharma, the people who don’t assume it’s because he’s a quack.

He seems to be pretty keen on Executive Orders, whether he has the power or not.

Not much different than Obama then, who has bombed 7 nations over the course of 8 years, entirely with executive orders. He”s a war criminal and mass murdered, no different that Bush was.

When John Kerry was at the UN swearing there was proof Assad gassed his own people, I kept flashing back to that traitor and liar Colin Powell claiming there was a weapons of mass destruction program.

When Dennis Kucinich and Tulsi Gabbard actually went on a fact finding excursion to find out, I flashed back to Scott Ritter.

The US government has been run by war criminals for 16 years. I’m not saying anything has changed, I’m saying it’s possible that it has. It wouldn’t have with Clinton who knew Qatar and Saudia Arabia was funding ISIS, and so was Obama, if you are to believe Kucinich and Gabbard, who didn’t find any “moderate” rebels.

Let’s be frank. Only idiots allow their children to be injected with mercury, squalene, formaldehyde etc. And allow their hereditary immunity to be tweaked with respect generally harmless childhood illnesses.
It’s basically a gene pool cleanup. Karma’s on the cleaners, though.

The name of this site is ‘science’ blogs; you know, about science and the lack thereof. I am just wondering, how scientific is this roasting, skewing, and burning of Mike Adams and his website naturalnews.com? As an independent research scholar and a student of medical history, I am appalled at how ‘unscientific’ your approach is when describing naturalnews.com and the sites’ content. Mike Adams may indeed be right about there being a targeted attack against him and his site! Your blog just proves his point!

He’d be very happy if all of you twinkies would just shut up and get on with your lives.
Could someone interpret Katie’s insults for me? — for I am not wise in the ways of your American idiom. Are Orac and his usual commentariat supposed to be baked junk-food products?

Your pitiful”faux “blog should be an embarassment to you. You people are WORSE THAN THE FUCKING COWARDS who dlisted this guy. These cuckoldsuse censorship because they know theiR views don’t stand up to reason. GOOGLE, PAYPAL,REDIT, FACEBOOK,TWITTER by their cencorship of opposing opinions are admitting the inherent irrational weakness of their views. YOU’RE ALL A BUNCH OF FUCKING COWARDS. There are many who agree with me. And your MONOPOPLY WILL SOON COME TO AN END. FUCK YOU, YOU SISSY-BOY MILQUETOASTS. YOU SHOULD HANG YOUR HEADS IN DISGRACE. HAVE FUN IN HELL.

DiD wRiTiNg In RaNdOm UpPeR aNd LoWeR cAsE pRoVe YoU pOiNt In AnY wAy?

Hint, no. Nor did your profanity or calling people cuckold prove anything other than your profound lack of intellect.
Delisting a site that presents pages other than what was listed in the search is nothing more than reputation protection. Google also delists known malware sites.
Google is not a government, the website still exists and is cranking out crank drivel even as we speak.

” I am just wondering, how scientific is this roasting, skewing, and burning of Mike Adams and his website naturalnews.com?”

Things fall apart
It’s scientific

– Talking Heads

“As an independent research scholar”

In other words, a proud holder of a Google University diploma?

It’s always fun when alties invoke Semmelweis to show that Doctors Were Wrong Before, never noticing the strong similarities between alt med advocates and the physicians who clung to old practices and rejected Semmelweis (speaking of whom, it appears controversial whether the cause of his death was really a beating by sanitarium guards, as is reported by certain sources (some of whom report the story as “possibly” or “probably” occurring). On the other hand, according to britannica.com:

“In 1865 he suffered a breakdown and was taken to a mental hospital, where he died. Ironically, his illness and death were caused by the infection of a wound on his right hand, apparently the result of an operation he had performed before being taken ill. He died of the same disease against which he had struggled all his professional life.”

Back to Mike Adams’ trauma – I propose that whenever we refer to NN from now on, it should be “the delisted Natural News” (as a tribute to those folks who have gleefully (and dishonestly) referred to Dr. Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch as “delicensed”).

and to make it worse. A Google staff member tried to post in that thread on NN about the real reasons it was removed and the post was not approved.
We can only assume t was not approved as it does not play into the narrative that Mike Adams want to spin for his gullible followers.

The following illustrates that fake news has infiltrated the highest levels of scientifically respectable journalism. We need dissident voices.

(followed by well-known quotes by Angell and Horton)
Setting aside the fact that it was not censorship, Angell and Horton didn’t have sites like NN in mind as viable answers to their criticism of peer-reviewed journals.
These websites piggyback on real problems of science journals and pretend they are avoiding these problems, when in reality they are acting even worse.
They certainly never talk about real efforts to improve medical science publishing (Cochrane works, All Trials, journals like the french Prescrire, etc.) and let their readers imagine they are the only solution that exists.
They let them think that their cartoonish way of writing and investigating is the way real pharmaceutical scandals are meant to be discovered and denounced. Such a diversion of militant energy that could be used to improve the medical system / press is really depressing to watch.

You obviously have no clue as to why NN was delisted. Mike Adams knows and he is lying about it. You are falling for it.
A Google staff member even tried to post in that thread on NN as to why and what they have to do to get it relisted (the post was not approved).
All this plays into the narrative that Mike Adams is spinning and you falling for it.
The facts do not suit that narrative.
Mike Adams could get NN back in Google tomorrow if he wants to. All he has to do is stop the sneaky mobile redirects that he put on the site. That is all. There is no censorship and no conspiracy.

The Nazis were very adept at choosing what is real and not real. So were the Stazi. So were the KGB. And guess what, they burned books in order to prevent people from having alternative views. You guys are sick, and disgusting.

The Internet has become ‘Critical Infrastructure’ in the US, can that even be debatable?
Now with the Globalist (Facist) Giants controling what we are ‘allowed’ to see, it is time they had to answer to ‘We The People’.
SIGH THE PETITION! SHARE IT WITH ALL YOUR CONTACTS!

At first I thought harold was just describing a new SUSE derived version of linux, but in his haste forgot to capitalise. cuckholdSUSE™

Then I realised that it was a missing space and he meant to type “…cuckholds use…”.

But finally I realised it was a subtle code for everyone to kindly ignore anything that might follow, because anyone who feels the need to start off an argument with denigrating those they disagree with as cuckholds is basically saying “look at me I have nothing”.

Hey dumbass Orac,
Answer these questions:
1. Is ANY AMOUNT of mercury in the body classified as a poison?
2. What purpose does mercury serve in vaccines in regard to human health? That is, why is it needed in vaccines?
You’re an idiot for criticizing Adams. It is YOU who are clueless.

perhaps you could explain why Mike Adams is lying as to why his site has been removed from Google?
A Google staff member tried to post in that thread on Natural News as to why the site was removed and what needs to be done to get it relisted. As you are such a NN fan boy, perhaps you could explain why the post was not approved?
Could it be that the truth does not fit into his narrative that you were so gullible to fall for?

It may be true that Natural news might not appeal to all, and spreads some poorly researched information. However, before you cheer about its demise from Google searches and archives (it appears that they’re up today though), it might behoove you to consider this: Maybe one day it might be you or your site that becomes persona non grata because someone doesn’t like what you have to say. Freedom of speech needs to apply to all, no matter how distasteful it might be.

Pulling a line from an unrelated article, but still goes to teh point:

“The people in charge of these institutions understand that if suppression of speech ever becomes the default option in America, the people being suppressed will be on the left, not the right. They also know that the only way to defeat bad ideas is to advance good ideas—and that the time to get started on that urgent task is now.” ( http://reason.com/archives/2017/02/16/free-speech-even-for-corey-lewandowski )

Replace “Left” and “Right” with whatever person or entity you wish, it’s all the same.

This is not a freedom of speech issue.
Natural News has ‘sneaky mobile redirects’. That is why google removed them. Google to that to every site that does it as it impacts on their search results.
Mike Adams knows that.
All he has to do is fix that technical problem and his site will be relisted.
Simple and as easy as that. There is no conspiracy etc etc

Now, as if he chooses to fix it is another story. That would mean he has to admit he just lied to all his fans.

More seriously: 300k people out of 320 million is a little less than one in a thousand. A back-of-the-envelope calculation based on life expectancy gives a total annual death rate of about 13 per thousand. So not impossible; the former is about 7% of the latter. But I’d like to see what they define as a death due to medical error. I suspect there is more than a little post hoc ergo propter hoc in that number.

Most of the Russian and Polish salads that use dill use sour cream rather than mayonnaise. You can substitute yogurt if you’re feeling healthy. But if you don’t like dill anyway… you probably wouldn’t last long in Russia or Poland. 🙂

We in the mainstream media in Noo Zillund censor reader comments all the time. It’s actually pretty funny listening to the newsroom comments moderators whispering conspiratorially about reader comments they are not letting slip through the net. Sometimes they do so by mistake with something a little too incisive, and there is hell to pay. We’re pretty precious with their narratives. They’re investments, you see.
I’ve also worked alongside intelligence officers in newsrooms (Operation Mockingbird, Noo Zillund style), so there’s that.

Details! Name names! Which NZ newsrooms were these? Which mainstream media? Who were the intelligence officers? They might be my erstwhile colleagues.

I’ve never heard of Mike Adams or Natural News. Google has every right to ban whoever they want – for the same reason that a baker in Oregon has the right to refuse service to homosexuals.

It’s called the right of association.

However, I find it ironic that most people who support this Google ban and make fun of Mike Adams, are the very same people who would disparage the baker and who would definitely be extremely upset if it were their website that was blacklisted.

The ignorance and hypocrisy of the far left (aka communists) never ceases to amaze me.

I see Google staffers are even reaching out to Mike Adams and Natural News via Twitter telling him what he needs to do to fix this … wonder why he chooses to ignore them? Could it be if he fixes this, he will have to admit that he lied?

Unless there’s a Google Rule that rules violators must admit culpability (which is highly doubtful), Google would be content with having the problem fixed and almost certainly never comment publicly on the outcome. So Adams would be free to continue to spin his conspiracy tales, while triumphantly announcing that Google backed down in the face of a petition from outraged citizenry or similar hogwallow.

In the likely event that the delisting is short-term, NN wins – lots of publicity and a revved-up supporter base which probably will make up for any temporary drop in site traffic by buying more NN slop in the future (stories and products).

He does not have to admit it to google. All he has to do is fix the tech issues and let Google know and they will reindex. That simple.

He has spun a conspiracy as it suits his narrative. If he has to admit to his followers that it was the ‘sneaky mobile redirects that he created on his site that caused this, then he is effectively admitting to his followers that he lied about this being a conspiracy – he will certainly spin it otherwise as his followers are so gullible. He has certainly spun this for all its worth.

Have you been to China in the last 20 years or so? If you are ethnic Han and live in the People’s Republic of China, there is plenty of money to be made by being both at once.

It’s harder to pull off if you’re a gweilo or you live in the West, but as JP notes, such trivial details don’t matter to these people. By their logic, corporate shill = bad, communist = bad, therefore corporate shill = communist.

Oh I do love it when people start by writing something like this. It makes it ever so clear they have never been here before. Given the heavily moderation comment sections on many anti-vax blogs and heck, in my experience Natural News itself, I am not surprised they expect it, but it seems like a bit of projection to think everyone else moderates like that.

I’ve been a fan of yours for years, but boy do I disagree on this one.

I have not read Adams’ rant and I do not intend to. Sure Natural news is woo woo nonsense, but I don’t want my search engines filtering my content. You’re not trying to tell me that Natural news was showing up when I searched Google scholar are you? We are talking about a general google search?

Does anyone honestly think that we will have fewer stupid people if we hide the woo wOO from them?

This whole “fake news” idea was invented to shut down dissenting political opinions.

As for Milo, look at the state of free speech in this country. Why have things gotten so bad here that we need to have a foreigner come in to remind us that we need to protect our free speech? People actually hate him for having opinions that they disagree with. They actually get violent! There was a riot at Berkley when he went to speak and they actually cancelled the event. Insane!

If I hear more facts on Milo, I will change my mind. As for now, all I know is that he was speaking of his own experiences as a 13 year old. He was the child. I am not aware of him going after 13 year olds or others too young as an adult man. Perhaps he would rather not view himself as a victim. The world needs more people like that. Perhaps humor is his way of dealing with it and there’s nothing wrong with that.

This blog seems to to extend from the self-fondling egotism of scientists who pitch science as a new religion superseding all others.
Let’s not forget that science is by definition a body of knowledge that is always changing and being revised, and thus can thus essentially be defined as the limits of what is known. It isn’t all-knowing, in fact it’s actively ignorant.
It’s the method that counts.
Now apply that method, plus logic, to the shutdown of natural news, infowars and multiple other independent media channels that (just coincidentally) have been labelled as Russian propaganda. (http://www.propornot.com/p/home.html).
Is there a correlation here?
And are they Russian propaganda*?

* this news angle was singularly the most laughable fake news of 2016 imho and I’ve worked in media for 22 years

Oh I do love it when people start by writing something like this. It makes it ever so clear they have never been here before.

It also tends to indicate that what follows will be some variety of weapons-grade stupid. In the comment in question, the commenter tries to equate Google’s delisting of a website that was engaged in misrepresenting its content to their search engine with a small business owner refusing service to a potential customer based on prejudice. Google is reacting to actions that could harm its other customers, specifically other websites that might be competing in the same space as Natural News. That’s like an airline banning a passenger who got drunk in flight and started to beat up on another passenger: the airline wants to make sure that the drunk passenger harms any other of their customers (not to mention their employees) in the future. Whereas a given customer’s gender, national or ethnic origin, religious beliefs (if any), or sexual orientation are unlikely to harm any other person. That is why discriminating against customers on any of those grounds should not be tolerated (as well as being bad business; the customer’s money is just as good no matter which of those categories the customer belongs to). It’s reasonable to turn a customer away due to capacity constraints (“We’re sold out/booked”) or due to not offering the service (“We prepare Western-style cakes, not moon cakes,” or “We are a halal butcher shop, so we don’t prepare pork products”), as long as that’s done independently of who the customer is.

Oh, this may have been posted already, but I did not see it when I looked back into the comments. This article goes into more detail about the issue, and specific pages which apparently had, or still have, problems. I’ve not been able to check it on a mobile device yet.https://www.seroundtable.com/google-natural-news-deindex-23463.html

And Mikey carries on his epic temper tantrum, with new #SaveNaturalNews buttons. He’s now raging that Google simply used his violation as an “excuse” to “censor” his speech, and that they would never have done the same thing to a “liberal rag.”

He has a new “broadcast” up to. I’ll probably listen to it for sh!ts and giggles and tell you if it’s funny enough to listen to or not… before I get back to work.

Glad you are doing this service JP. I just don’t have to stomach for it any longer as it is just the same stuff over and over.

He could end this so easily, the fix is so trivial, but it clearly helps him to milk this as much as possible. His followers are eating it up, and even when faced with the real reasons, they are denying it, or continuing to say it must have been selectively done. I don’t think they understand how incredibly common it is for sites to get penalized like this, and they have done it for some pretty big companies as well, such as BMW, who was caught for cloaking, and removed much like Natural News.http://marketingland.com/10-big-brands-that-were-penalized-by-google-69646

JP @223: I find some Russian salads terrifying. Last week a friend posted a picture of the traditional Russian salad “herring in a fur coat” which had been shaped to look like a herring in a beet-purple fur coat, complete with head and fins.

h, this may have been posted already, but I did not see it when I looked back into the comments. This article goes into more detail about the issue, and specific pages which apparently had, or still have, problems. I’ve not been able to check it on a mobile device yet.https://www.seroundtable.com/google-natural-news-deindex-23463.html

The e-mail in the comments section there is very telling. Natural News knows what the problem is. But it is nothing to do with them, it was due to one of their bloggers! (My Bullshït Meter™ is currently bubbling up to the red zone).

The e-mail in the comments section there is very telling. Natural News knows what the problem is. But it is nothing to do with them, it was due to one of their bloggers!

Even taking them at their word on that, which I am not, it really doesn’t matter if it was just some of their bloggers doing it without permission, they still have the responsibility to stop it, and delisting until it is done is not exactly uncommon. Otherwise those paid links are still there, still capable of generating revenue.

Google has a set of guidelines that websites are expected to adhere to if they want to be indexed in Google. Mike Adams made a choice to not adhere to them. As a result of that choice, his site was removed from Google. How the f is that censorship?

Don’t do me any favors by censoring where and from whom I obtain my information. You leave faux Fox need on your Google engine and they have more misinformation than any other site. Some of that information is also quite dangerous to our country. So eliminate Fox need and put Natural News, which I have been following for a decade. If not, I will switch search engines.

Mike Adams of Natural news is no saint! He used to be more honest until he started banning people that disagreed with the bad science he used when testing other companies products! He has bad mouthed many other nutritional products just so he could sell his own similar products on his website! He has banned many others from posting on Natural News and his related websites as soon as they attempted to post into his website and blogs to expose what he was doing to make more self-serving money for himself while hurting so so many good people! I’m no lover of Google folks but I want you people to know that Mike Adams is not the nice guy he used to be and he just got a taste of his own medicine by being banned himself!

Even taking them at their word on that, which I am not, it really doesn’t matter if it was just some of their bloggers doing it without permission…

No it matters hugely. This will be the excuse that Mike Adams uses to his marks who see through the conspiracy by the CDC and Google angle to deflect blame from himself.

Adams will be aware that 90% the internet is now aware of the issue being that he was trying to pull a fast one against Google’s terms of service. And after all Adams has to keep his marks spending their money on him.

Guaranteed this writer is connected to big corporate pharmaceuticals in some way or other. Either pushing life dependent synthetic drugs onto people or some other worthless snake oil treatment that has limited success. This idiot is entitled to an opinion but loses all credibility when he denies the exposed autism vaccine link. Take the beam out your own eye #fakenews

No it matters hugely. This will be the excuse that Mike Adams uses to his marks who see through the conspiracy by the CDC and Google angle to deflect blame from himself.

I definitely agree, it totally matters when it comes to how he will present it to his rubes, but in terms of responsibility over a website, whether he knew about it or not is beside the point. But I am sure this will end up being a big part of his excuses once his conspiracy theories are no longer useful.

Now that the mainstream media is losing their power of influence it is understandable that pressure is being brought to bear on Google to silence dissenting voices. Clearly, the old establishment is running scared when they couldn’t even put their puppet Hillary in the Whitehouse.
There is a changing of the guard happening and the old power blocs don’t like it one bit!
These attacks on free speech are to be expected and are a sign that things are moving in the right direction.

WTF are you talking about? This has nothing to do with free speech or pressure put on Google!
Mike Adams was using sneaky redirects on the mobile version of his site which is against Google’s guidelines. Any site that does that gets removed until they fix it. Happens to 100’s of sites a day.
Perhaps you should ask Mike Adams why he is ranting and raving so you gullible idiots are falling for his narrative and why he is not getting on and fixing this. He could be back in Google tomorrow if he wanted to. All he has to do is fix the redirects. Its that simple.

Emil and Rodica Radita were today convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to prison with no chance of parole for 25 years in the death of their son Alex, who was 15 years old and weighed just 37 pounds at the time of his death. Alex got prayers instead of insulin for his diabetes.

I had intended to be in court for the verdict, but instead spent most of the day in a local ER due to a skirmish (which I lost) with gravity and the possibility of a busted spleen.

They actually get violent! There was a riot at Berkley when he went to speak and they actually cancelled the event. Insane!

If I hear more facts on Milo, I will change my mind. As for now, all I know is that he was speaking of his own experiences as a 13 year old. He was the child. I am not aware of him going after 13 year olds or others too young as an adult man. Perhaps he would rather not view himself as a victim. The world needs more people like that. Perhaps humor is his way of dealing with it and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Oh FFS the D-Bag incited a mob against a black actress because she’s black. The full transcripts are available for his paedophilia defence; avail yourself of them before whinging like he does. As for Mikey Adams, what part of he violated G-gle’s TOS don’t you freakin understand before whinging yet again about censorship. It’s obvious Mikey’s readership has the collective mental acuity of a turnip, not to mention these self-proclaimed freedum fighters.

With all the fake news being published which most of it I believe it is beginning to be hard to believe anything. The 23rd of February I watched Dr. Oz and he had a publisher of fake news on his show. The man said his company made $6k + per fake news article they published.
I think I will check out all news I believe in and find out what their political preference is. If they support President Trump I will be more inclined to believe them. If the protesters don’t watch out the Communist’s Agenda will take hold.

Just before I had to haul my carcass off this morning, someone was equating this event to book burning.

The books remain on their shelves and are available to anyone who wishes to use them. The sole thing that has happened is that a third party who, at their own expense put index cards for the contents of that library in the card file that they own and operate, yanked the cards because the library in question violated the rules that apply to every single one of the libraries whose contents have cards in the file.

I did not realise how slavish and dependent my thinking had become, until I read the 53rd identical comment left by NN fanbois who had obeyed Mikey’s instructions to come here and boast about their intellectual independence.

and they are allowed to post here uninhibited without censorhip. Perhaps one of these NN fan boys could explain why the comment on the NN post from a Google staff member about what was needed to fix the problem was not approved … go figure they complain about censorhip

Richard Wicks, #182: “Ignaz Semmelweis was a lunatic doctor who advocated washings hands before handling patients because he believed that tiny organisms caused illness. He was put into a mental asylum where he was beaten to death.”
Semmelweis did not believe in ‘tiny organisms”, but that decaying organic matter caused disease.This was decades before Pasteur produced evidence for the germ theory. Semmelweis was committed because his behavior changed. He suffered serious depression, fought with everyone around him, drank heavily, and showed signs of dementia. Modern physicians who have researched the available evidence have variously suggested Alzheimer’s disease or tertiary syphilis, among other conditions, as the cause of his symptoms.
His treatment in the insane asylum was, sadly, typical of the times. He was beaten, restrained, wrapped in wet sheets, and suffered other abuses. His death was due to gangrene, which has been attributed to skin sloughing from his restraints.
None of this is relevant to Mike Adams, or to his violation of Google’s ToS. None of this is relevant to the fact that vaccines have been studied for many decades by physicians, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, and other scientists, and no evidence of the evils claimed by antivaxers has ever shown up.

Milo Yiannopoulos can view his pubescent sexual experiences however he chooses, and this is not the issue with him. The really repugnant part is here: “Yiannopoulos failed to report child sex abuse so extreme that he himself said it “beggared belief.”
The admission was made in a 2015 interview with comedian and commentator Joe Rogan. At 4:46 in the video found here, the openly-homosexual Yiannopoulos explains how he attended the “boat parties” and “house parties” of Hollywood figures of the stature of film producer Bryan Singer (who has been accused of minor sex abuse). At these events, grown men were using for sex boys who were, as Yiannopoulos puts it, “very young—very young.”” (http://observer.com/2017/02/breitbart-milo-yiannopoulos-joe-rogan-podcast-child-sex-abuse/) Even that wasn’t the problem. The terrible thing about what he related is that even though he was staggered by what he saw, he said nothing, and beyond that, his own words indicate that after seeing this, he continued to attend those parties. Even if he was afraid to come forward, shouldn’t his shock and presumed disgust have kept him from going after the first one?
He can say whatever he wants, and long distance diagnosis isn’t worth much, but to me he seems to be something of a psychopath.

If this censorship is fact than it is completely and utterly Orwellian control over the information people are entitled to seeing and using at their own accord. This blogger, whomever wrote this article is highly misinformed about the nature of a free world. Not to mention google is based out of the U.S.A., which has an amendment acknowledging the freedom of speech in very simple and easy to understand language.
I understand that Google is a private company and we’re using their services but this looks as if it’s the start to censorship within the United States. I am afraid to know what else Google is black-listing from the web.
We should never have to censor any news platform no matter what the topic or what people think of it. These are the ideologies of why the U.S.A. was founded in the first place; in order to maintain and uphold a free and open world, held to the highest standards by the Constitution.
We live in a Constitutional Republic, not a democracy, and most certainly not a socialistic empire controlled by the government. We are the government, We are the people. If you don’t like it, LEAVE!!!

P.S. This article is a disgrace to our ancestors who came to this land seeking freedom from oppression abroad. You should be disgusted with yourself. But this is only an opinion and I will respect that, since I seek to have my opinions respected and not impeded on as well.

If Google is the web for you, you’re really, really poorly informed.
Google is a search engine company, there are quite a few other search engine companies out there.
Google is not the web host of NN, NN has their own web hosting service that they use and their pages are still up, easily available to anyone who knows how to type an address into the URL bar.

Now, companies have reputations to uphold, if one searches for a site and the results aren’t what they should be, that reputation suffers and investors don’t receive a return on their investments. That is legally actionable and the company CEO could lose badly in a court of law, should the company’s stockholders seek redress for their lack of return on investment.
So, Google took steps to protect the reputation of their product.

I believe that they only pulled down his listings many of which attack other company’s that sell good quality nutrient products just so Mike Adams can turn readers to his own line of products. This guy has done some good things in the past but now he’s not much more than a raving nut case that could care less how he hurts others for his own self-financial gain! His website is still up so they really did not put him out of business. Mr Adams has banned many people from posting in his websites when they call him out on his BS bad science claims to hurt his product competitors! He just got a taste of his own medicine! He had it coming to him and please understand I am no lover of Google. He just had it coming because he deserved it!

Google is obviously getting too big for its own boots, there is NOTHING in Mike Adams site that could be described a dangerous. .. as with all things, it is people’s choice to visit this site read and make their own decisions. No one is forced to visit … so Google there are plenty of things happening in the world which you seem to ignore and therefore accept and do nothing about it…… shame on you for this censorship it is not up to you to decide what people can read.. looks more like comrade Google and China… OR Mao and China, and other countries where we have seen books burnt Google is in precarious company. .. I demand you return full access to Mike Adam’s website immediately.

Jen you need to pay attention! Google did not remove his website! It’s still there! They delisted his links! Many of which he has bad mouthed other people’s company’s that sell proven high-quality nutrient products just so he could turn them to purchase them from his own website! He’s not the nice guy that he used to be!

I really couldn’t be less fond of a website than I am of ScienceBlogs, which has apparently never met an official story about anything that it didn’t love. That said, the mega-players in “alternative” media these days are just the flip side of the disinformation coin–although they generally still carry much more valuable information. The power players of the world wouldn’t have thrown their mainstream media minions under the bus this last election season without alternatives to fall back on, to appease the many people who have realized that criminal conspiracies are their bread-and-butter.

No need to worry about NN–the issue with Google will be resolved in short order, and business for NN will be booming more than ever, thanks to a plethora of righteous indignation about this alleged attempt at censorship by “The Man.” And we’ll be flooded with stories about how “We The People” saved the day with our outcry against it. The media manipulation strategy being used here is nothing new.

Jen Boon: ” I demand you return full access to Mike Adam’s website immediately.” Who are you asking? Orac? Me? Do you really think anyone here decides what Google lists or how? Tell them.
Anyway, you never lost full access to Mike Adams. All you have to do is type in the URL in the address bar of your browser, or if that’s as hard for you as figuring out that Orac is not really the secret identity of Sergei Brin, use another search engine. Just Google “search engine” .

It’s amazing that Mikes hard core Natural News followers are so BLIND! and Dumb? Maybe! A load of people including me already explained that his website was never taken down! And also explained that only his BS filled listings were delisted for breaking the Google rules. Google HATES Link sellers! It robs the hard working honest website owners!

The part where he admits that “some bloggers on Natural News were “selling outbound links”” is rather important to this story. It means the site was doing things that are against the rules, the kind of thing that Google regularly delists sites for. Lots and lots of websites get caught doing these things, and find themselves delisted. Natural News is not special, it has not been picked on and given special harsh treatment. They have been given a standard penalty for sites doing what they were doing.

You’d think that might give people some pause over the claims of censorship and targeting NN. When someone from Natural News PR is saying that is what was going on, and indicates behaviour which is actually breaking the rules, it starts to seem rather silly to say it is a horrible conspiracy.

Delisting NN for terms of service violations is NOT censorship. It is a private company deciding not to carry a site on its private corporate service. For all you libertarians and Trumpettes, this is the free enterprise you so claim to love. This is the free market at work. If your local newsstand decides to stop carrying, say, the Daily Mail or Modern Gardener for any reason at all, that is their right. It’s a business decision. The movie theatre can choose not to carry movies about monsters or fluffy bunnies. There is no National Search Engine Regulatory Administration that can order Google to list or not list any site. Any Americans who still don’t get this probably don’t deserve to vote because when it comes to the First Amendment you don’t have the First Clue. Others from elsewhere, get the message. We don’t operate the way you do. Private individuals and corporate entities can embrace or reject anyone else’s speech on their platform as they choose. If you don’t like it, use Bing, or Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo. Or demand that Orac resurrect AskJeeves.

And when I say “the kind of thing that Google regularly delists sites for” I don’t mean they do it a few few days for a few select sites, these penalties are applied to hundreds, if not thousands of sites each day. This isn’t some strange and rare event, it happens to sites big and small.

I haven’t had a chance to read the newest articles over at NN, but I am curious if anyone else has. From the titles I did see he is basically admitting they were selling outbound links, but is now accusing Google of selectively applying the rules, and ignoring their own violations of the same rules. Would be interested in seeing what they found and if they are misunderstanding the problem they had, versus what they found on Blogspot etc.

The post by NWO Reporter is really scary. So the “power players” have torched mainstream media disinformation sources, in order to feed us more disinformation from “alternative” news sources! And who is “NWO Reporter”, really? Aaaagh! It makes you want to crawl into a hole and reject all information, which is undoubtedly what They want. No matter where you turn, there are false flags everywhere! I’d stock up on survival gear, but They make enormous profits off that too. (!!!!?!?!?!?$&#*^!!)

I couldn’t stomach reading all the articles on NN furiously denouncing the Google Overlords and flinging tu quoque accusations left and right (I stopped counting at nine such articles featured on the home page as of this morning). I do know that the very best way to get back into Google’s good graces and get relisted is to declare war on them. That Mike Adams is a very cagey fellow.

I admired Aaron Russell’s dumbth so much I felt obliged to bring it back to the end of the thread, as a tribute to the power of the human imagination. Also I wondered whether he is making up his own personal collection of Alt-Facts or whether they are common knowledge in the human centipede of Antivaxxia.

Google …is more than 51% owned by Government hedge funds
That would probably come as a surprise to Brin and Page.

<i<the fact that the CDC itself owns 75% of all vaccine patents,

It was not enough to say “the CDC own more than 21 vaccine patents” (afer RFK Jnr) or “the CDC owns 57 vaccine patents” (after Ginger Taylor). Some numptie had to go one better and pump the number up to 75%. How many thousand is that?

>
Postscript: John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analysts at Google, has now posted on Twitter saying Google did post a message about the penalty in Google Search Console. He also added a thread that the site was penalized due to sneaky mobile redirects. John said:

>
Hi! I work with the Google Search team. We’re seeing a bit of confusion & incorrect stories circulating about what’s happening here, so just to be super clear — Natural News is using a sneaky mobile redirect, which is prohibited by our webmaster guidelines (there’s a bit about this kind of issue at https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2015/10/detect-and-get-rid-of-unwanted-sneaky.html ). These redirects aren’t always easy to reproduce, they’re sometimes in widgets or served by ad networks, and can target specific devices, browsers, or user locations. When we last checked, there was one on http://blogs. naturalnews. com/bentonite-clay-a-natural-medicine-cabinet-must-have/ . As soon as this is cleaned up, the site can submit a reconsideration request through Search Console, and once that’s reviewed things will return to normal. No action has been taken based on the editorial content of this site.

Edward Snowden; “The answer to bad speech is not censorship. The answer to bad speech is more speech. We have to exercise and spread the idea that critical thinking matters now more than ever, given the fact that lies seem to be getting very popular,” Snowden told Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

Thomas Jefferson; “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.”…”Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”…Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched?

John Adams;”“But none of the means of information are more sacred, or have been cherished with more tenderness and care by the settlers of America, than the press.”…”“The liberty of the press is essential to the security of the state.”

George Washington”“If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.”

US Constitution”“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

So, when did Google replace the US Congress?
If it hasn’t, then your entire series of quotes is irrelevant, which it is anyway, as delisting a website from searches over a sneaky redirect code is not censorship. It’s no more censorship than my regulating what a guest in my home says.

It was not enough to say “the CDC own more than 21 vaccine patents” (afer RFK Jnr) or “the CDC owns 57 vaccine patents” (after Ginger Taylor). Some numptie had to go one better and pump the number up to 75%. How many thousand is that?

We’re getting into Joe McCarthy territory here.

For those kids and non-USA folk who don’t recognize the reference: Sen. Joseph McCarthy became infamous in the 1950s for his Communist witch hunts. He gave a series of speeches in which he claimed to have in his hand “a list of [number pulled from his posterior in real time] Communists working for the State Department.” Sounds like the anti-vax crowd is playing a similar game with claims about vaccine patents.

You leftist fucktards!! You are the wretchedest, scummiest, quakiest pieces of shit out there. Mike Adams has done wonderful, pro-human research for years. How much are you being paid off to talk shit by George Soros, Monsanto, and big Pharma. You anti-human scum-fucks.

Odd, how am I getting paid by companies and individuals that I’ve never had contact with?
I’ve been paid by the US Army and my government service company. For the former, to be a SF medic, for the latter, to provide security for contacted government cloud based services.

I’m also at a loss of how one can be a corporate type and be a leftist, which would imply socialism, not corporatism.

This is terrible news. I have never heard of Natural News, but definitely don’t agree with Google using its power to effectively censor a browsers access to information. This kind of behavior is a slippery slope down a one way path. Google should be destroyed.

To be the devils advocate for a moment, though NaturalNews should have been neutered long before it caused so much harm.
1) Though a conspiracy theory and Marketing NaturalNews was always reliable to have some quick response to anything that contradicted its views. This was a valuable source of information for those of us who track fake news, erroneous beliefs, latest medical scams.
2) This will not change anything. As mentioned NaturalNews is already endemic and has created progeny before it was removed from the gene pool by earning the Darwin Award. In addition Conspiracy Theory loves to be persecuted because that proves their conspiracy theory, not to mention the backfire effect.
3) Last as an aside, have you noticed that Respectful Insolence headlines are similar to Conspiracy Theory headlines. Long, lots of punctuation marks, ALL CAPS, and words like hilarious, epic, tantrum.

The most ironic part of all this is that Mike Adams set up his own search engine, Good Gopher, whose main selling point is that it censors sites that disagree with his own worldview. “Do as I say, not as I do”.

You are exactly right and on the money Colin! Mike Adams has been banning hundreds maybe thousands of people that attempt to expose his BS bad science before they can get it to his many brainwashed readers. His posts of lies against honest nutrient company’s selling quality products that help others just so he can turn his readers to his own products that are listed in his website has been hurting a large amount of people. Both people that have been selling and taking the important nutrition products that help them stay healthy and have been for many years. His posts of lies have many people questioning the very products that have helped them stay healthy to the point of having then quit taking them. There could be dozens of people that have died because of this and I put this on his soul to deal with in this life and the hereafter. YES! Mike Adams the So Called Health Ranger Has Hurt Many Others And His Websites Being De-listed my Google was well deserved! He just got a taste of his own medicine! He had this coming for a long time and its about time it caught up to him! I feel absolutely NOTHING for his whining and I hope that he reads this post!

Nice article! There’s a world opening up for me – yours as well as theirs. Careful, though, the major problem with alt-right people is that they don’t have any sense of humor and no ability of selfreflection. And that is dangerous. They’re like the witch hunters, the only people who firmly believed that witches existed!

I find it fascinating that so many (allegedly different) people arrive here, clutching their pearls, making stirring speeches about censorship, having clearly failed to read (or comprehend) either the original post or the numerous responses.

It reminds me of the responses to the article about the death of the “Wellness Warrior”. Essentially, the pattern is the same. These people feel the need to blurt what they believe to be true without pausing to consider the facts, utterly failing to engage with clear evidence which contradicts their opinion.

It is all entertaining enough while they remain in cyberspace. However, proper havoc can ensue when they escape into real life. For example, one of their ilk managed to become president of the world’s most powerful country.

Your right on DR. Bollocks! People, espessilly Mike Adams readers need to know that there has been and is a VERY dark side to his actions that hurt many others including his own readers! LOTS OF THEM! Mike Adams has been banning hundreds maybe thousands of people that attempt to expose his BS bad science before they can get it posted to his many 100 percent trusting readers. His posts of lies against honest nutrient company’s selling quality products that help others just so he can turn his readers to his own products that are listed in his website has been hurting a huge amount of people. This indludes both people that have been manufacturing, selling and taking the important nutrition products that have helped them stay healthy and have been for many years. His posts of lies have many people questioning the very products that have helped them stay healthy to the point of having them quit taking the safe products that Mike Adams has posted negitive information about them. There could be dozens of people that have died because of this and I put this on Mike Adams soul to deal with in this life and the hereafter. YES! Mike Adams the So Called Health Ranger Has Hurt Many Others And His Websites Being De-listed in Google for posting impropper links by Google Rules was well deserved! He just got a taste of his own medicine! He had this coming for a long time and its about time it caught up to him! I feel absolutely NOTHING for his whining, threats and bad faith to his readers. I hope that he reads this post!

so many (allegedly different) people arrive here, clutching their pearls, making stirring speeches about censorship, having clearly failed to read (or comprehend) either the original post or the numerous responses.

Half of them are under the impression that they are delivering their carefully-thought-out messages directly to Google, or to Communist Headquarters, having followed a link through from Mikey’s FB page without bothering to read that either.

Half of them are under the impression that they are delivering their carefully-thought-out messages directly to Google, or to Communist Headquarters, having followed a link through from Mikey’s FB page without bothering to read that either.

“The common talk of the day amongst the Whigs was, that Cope would soon ‘cock up the Pretender’s beaver.'”

First off, please show me, Adams fans, where in the First Amendment it says you have the right to have your web page/blog/twitter feed wtf-ever indexed by Google, a private company. Second, I have a blog. it’s not much, and I never link to it here. Google does not index my blog, because it draws 0 traffic. Finally, for you cement-heads calling Respectful Insolence “Fake News” kindly educate yourself a bit. This is a Blog. It is in which our host, yon lucite box full of blinking lights, writes his OPINIONS on things. It is, in fact, the modern day equivalent of an editorial page. While this does not stop Orac from posting actual news, it does mean that his content (unless listed otherwise) is not news and so cannot be “Fake News”. But thanks for playing.

Isnt it funny all other countries use natural cures to fight disease and cure it except the USA…lol and some of you all continue to eat food injected with chemical poisons and here is a man who is telling you about natural cures for all ailments and u dumb idiots believe the man who wrote this dumb article which he is being paid to do cuz he knows the truth as well. Its a proven fact our foods and water contain fluoride and chlorine which are poisons. Ask the FDA why they dont push for vitamins and healthy fruits and want us to stay on killer ?. Everytime somebody speaks the truth they try to discredit them. And yall idiots fall for it thinking our government cares. Lol grow up and visit places outside the usa and u will see that we are being lied to. There are in fact natural cures that cure everything…do your research and stop believing everything on the internet. All of google is controlled by the government and FDA of course they dont want the news out that natural remidies do in fact work…ask yourself when is the last time any one of you been sick…lol ..well i havnt been sick since 2002 because i eat all organic fruits and i see a health care practitioner not a medical doctor…not a medical doctor who is ONLY taught to give me drugs that of course is controlled by the FDA…lol so yall can keep taking your pills and getting your injected flu shots with mercury in it lol…because i have never had a flu shot and never will…im extremly healthy with no concerns at all….they push this on us knowing that these drugs kill us and if we go all natural its hurts them because their profits in the killer pharmaceutical companys will plummet…lol open your eyes fellas…dont believe the news, google etc….its all controlled by the FDA and other government agencies…wake up America….democrats and republicans are the same…vote independent…they are for the people. God bless all of you…stay off presciption drugs and go to your local health food store and change your life…

Why, you’re absolutely right, salt has chlorine in it and it’s lethal!
As for “all other countries”, I’ve been to well over 20 countries in my life, they all use the same medicines and vaccines that we do.
You must be thinking about countries on another planet.
But, the FDA doesn’t push fruits, the USDA does, as that’s part of their jobs. The NIH also recommends fruits, rather than high sugar snacks.
You also fail to comprehend what government is and what private industry is. Here’s a hint, Google stock closed today at $844.93. The government sells bonds, but does not issue stock.
I don’t like organic food, I like inorganic food, like rocks. Seriously, grow a brain.
I do take various medications, two blood pressure medications, otherwise my aorta would rupture and that would be extremely unpleasant. Dead kind of unpleasant. I also take hyperthyroid medication, which has quite literally saved both my life and my sanity.

But, after reading your words and weighing everything in total, I do strongly suggest that you seek professional mental health care guidance. Your touch with reality is tenuous at best and your rant, for a rant is what you have just provided us with, displays that break with reality quite well.

Google should have delisted Mke Adams forever! Honestly in the past and still now he still does have some good things to say. HOWEVER he has also badmouthed MANY good people and he has given out false information about many top quality supplement companies to damage their sales and reputations just so he could sell his own products shown in his website! He has gone to the dark side for his own selfish financial gain without a care in the world about hurting others with his big mouth and bad science mixed with lies and misinformation. The real truth is, his readers and followers should not blindly trust him or what he says because he is no longer to be trusted!

Waddayaknow. Mike Adams from Natural News is now calling for government regulation of Google, to require them to give notice and an opportunity to fix problems, and to prohibit censorship based on content. More top-down control– ostensibly in the interests of disseminating “truth.”

Would these regulations apply to Mike Adams’ search engine, Goodgopher–which purports to provide a fair platform for independent media sites? Because my website was deleted from Goodgopher not long after it was listed, without warning or explanation–and I can guarantee there were no sneaky programming tricks behind it. I wonder how many other small independent media sites have been censored by Goodgopher–sites that, on the surface, would appear to be in line with its mission?

In a world of complex counterintelligence operations, you’ve definitely got to dig deeper than the surface to discern the real mission. And it looks like this op by NN is on its way to mission accomplished–with a hat tip to Science Blogs (among others) for their helpful contributions.

Dave’s comment bespeaks voluminously of the sheer inability to comprehend simple English.
That’s both from the claim of censorship, by a company that is protecting its product’s reputation and the most massive misapprehension of what the right and left stand for, successfully getting the concepts fully 180 degrees around.
Indeed, there was never an instance when I’ve been threatened to be shot by someone on the left, alas, I cannot say the same about those on the right.

If you are going to write an article you should stick to the topic and not force us to hear your personal feelings about politics and irrelevant individuals. Ironic how this is tagged fake news, although false news would be more accurate. I was on board with you until you started slurring Milo as an “alt-right” (he’s not) troll (which he is self-admittedly), and I realized you are probably some liberal sjw brainwashed cuck. I’m not even for MIlo or everything he is for, but I’m smart enough to know he isn’t “alt-right” or very right at all. Alt-right is another fantasy term made up by guilty liberals to try and justify their current nonsense. Judging by this article. I’ll be surprised if this comment even makes it to the section. I think I will do a couple showcases of this blog on my Youtube channel, but you won’t enjoy the publicity.
Just to note, my only discussion with you will be in the open on this comment section.

Funny how you latched on to that one little aside about Milo, whom I hardly mentioned (seven lines out of hundreds) and then only in the course of making fun of how Mike Adams tried to link Milo’s downfall to Google’s delisting NaturalNews.com. I could easily have excised that paragraph and it wouldn’t have affected the meaning of the post much at all. I must say, you guys, for all your bluster about “cuckservatives” and “cucks” and “special snowflakes,” are very cold and uniquely crystalline yourselves. Indeed, the most special of the “special snowflakes” that I’ve observed have been Trump supporters and alt right hacks, who whine to high heaven at the slightest criticism of them or their heroes.

In any case, I’m curious. I wrote this three weeks ago, and suddenly there’s an influx of new commenters, including you. Where on earth did this appear? Why on earth does it matter any more, given that Adams was listed again by Google mere days after his delisting and is now operating as before the delisting, with no evidence of any lasting harm?

Well, if he actually does it, it could become annoying to deal with the likely influx of Infowars readers and followers that will appear here. Indeed, I kind of wonder what happened to bring him and a couple of others here this morning? Did someone post a link to this article somewhere, like on a conspiracy website or something?

This is the last time I will ever read anything on this web site. Whether you agree with Adams or not,, to write with such venom is unnecessary and shows the type pf person you are.
In a free society all people have a right to be heard. Although I do not agree with everything Adams says, on vaccines he is absolutely right. We know of several girls damaged for life by the Gardasil shot and a toddler of a friend, in intensive care for a week after the MMR.

It is just so unspeakably cruel of Orac to drag poor delicate Paul Watson in front of a monitor, jam in the eyelid specula and force him to read (which I guess is the same as “hear”) an article that offends his exquisitely sensitive feelings. Bad Orac! Bad, bad, Orac!

Stirring up controversy and righteous outrage sells, and brings in more followers for everyone. What are the marketing machinations going on behind the scenes here? We’re surrounded by niche-celebrity friends masquerading as sworn enemies, with the same powerful forces backing them all from the shadows.

No, Fucklesworth. Go back to hanging out at the Vapor Genie’s* place; I presume you’ve whomped up a new Disqustink account since that amusing scat-covering incident.

* You might note that he doesn’t get the same treatment that you do, despite having (had?) a comically stupid aura-of-mystery routine going on, complete with on-again, off-again pluralization. Perhaps you could muse on the reason for this.

“Alt-right” is what people call themselves when they basically agree with much of the NSDAP platform but still have just enough of a sense of shame to realize that admitting as much is still frowned upon. They may not want to admit that they’re fascists, but as the saying goes, denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.

I don’t know enough about Milo (and at this point really don’t care) whether he’s openly fascist or pretending not to be fascist.

Definitely the one where he claims he’ll never leave until his personal information is deleted, followed by his posting his personal information.

Antics like that leave me skeptical about the identification of the sock-puppeting nym-stealer. Yes, he has claimed in the past to be Travis S, but he steals identities. Perhaps he is some neghbour who dislikes Travis S. and wants to trash his reputation.

Perhaps he is some neghbour who dislikes Travis S. and wants to trash his reputation.

That thought crossed my mind at some point but given he threatened to “out” me if I didn’t remove his comments so he could find a job, I don’t doubt he’s Travis Schwochert. He lost his job as a window washer, somehow I doubt his vile comments are his biggest worry.

@HDB: I suppose it’s possible somebody is impersonating Travis impersonating other commenters, but Occam’s Razor tells me to prefer the theory that it really is Travis.

Consider how easily recognizable his posts are when he tries out a new nym. It takes a pretty good actor to be so consistent in character–few people can pull it off. But if it’s just Travis being Travis, that’s what you expect. And is the gain this putative third party gets from making Travis look bad worth the risk to his own reputation if he gets caught? IANAL, but I suspect it’s actionable if it can be proven. You don’t have to ask that question if somebody is (wittingly or otherwise) trashing his own reputation.

Actually, it’s not always true that his posts are easily recognizable. I recognize him right away when he’s impersonating someone because he’s basically scraping the bottom of the barrel with respect to old commenters whose e-mail addresses he can figure out. Either they’re people I remember and therefore immediately recognize an impersonation or they’re obscure but still recognizable to me. However, when he introduces a new sock, he often posts an innocuous comment, and I don’t always spot him the first time. Fortunately, he doesn’t take long to reveal himself; so the only time I don’t manage to shut him down instantly is when I’m away from the computer or phone too long.

Still, what a pathetic life he must live if spending so much time figuring out ways around my moderation here (or Science Mom’s moderation at her blog) is such a major form of entertainment for him. Sad.

My, is that the same mouth that you french kiss your mother with?!
Here is a hint, you demolish your own reputation with comments like you’ve been making and your overall behavior.

Especially when you start off sounding like me after I caught my fingers between the garage door panels while closing it.
At least, I had an excuse, heavily bruised fingertips. What’s your excuse, a bruised ego?

Well, if Travis is having trouble finding a job, I imagine the criminal record has as much to do with that as the obnoxious online comments. Given that a prospective employer can read for himself what Travis wrote, it’s kinda hard for him to complain.

How’d the court case go for fleeing and eluding a police officer go, Travis? Did you take a plea, or get the charges reduced?

Did it occur to you that with half the energy you spent here looking for old thread in which to scrounge up names, you could instead become a proficient Linux expert in no time, have Linux from scratch running on your computer (look here: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/systemd/ ) and hack away at things like the new Vulkan graphic stack (guess what I spent the night working on) or Tensorflow (some night ago) and earn a living later on…maybe not at google (that juvy thing might matter less than the comments dump you made here but it still matter). Deal?

Did it occur to you that with half the energy you spent here looking for old thread in which to scrounge up names, you could instead become a proficient Linux expert in no time, have Linux from scratch running on your computer (look here: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/systemd/ ) and hack away at things like the new Vulkan graphic stack (guess what I spent the night working on) or Tensorflow (some night ago) and earn a living later on…

(Grumble, grumble, grumble…)
Extracting logs from a compromised Linux server. Then, have to analyze them to see how some futhermucker managed to get shellbot.S onto the server, then I’ll have to explain to DHS why our logger was so saturated that we didn’t see the alerts.
Lemme see, MySQL, 500 – 1000 events per second – on top of regular traffic.
And now, I think that my ArcSight instance just crashed on me.

(Patience, only one hour to shift change and the midnight shift can finish extracting the traffic logs.)

Now I was fired for irking the asshole owner. He was a psycho-asshole and I couldn’t stand him.

Given your inability to accept any responsibility for your heinous actions against others and then lashing out at them for retaliating, I somehow doubt it was the owner who was the aṡṡhole. Get lost Travis.

@ Alain: I just Googled his real name and it came up on the first page of results.

Travis, it also says you were operating a vehicle. How’d you get away with not being charged with DUI? Not making yourself look better with the excuses, dude.

Then there’s the operating a motor vehicle without registering it, and another charge for operating a motor vehicle without proof of insurance.

I used to see guys just like you (ie same charges) cycle in and out of the local county jail when I was a correctional nurse. Time to get your life together kiddo. You’re too old for this.

And yes, it’s doxing, in the strictest sense of the term. Which is not a crime. Which I’ve done to show that the only person responsible for your reputation is you. The information is a public record, anyone can access it.

There’s an old saying I’ll paraphrase. When you have a problem with one or two people, it’s probably them who has the problem. When you have a problem with everyone around you, the problem is you.

Time to grow up Travis. And the truth is, if you would simply behave yourself and conduct your comments in a mature and honest fashion (which does not mean you have to agree with anyone), then no one would care about anything else and Orac would not keep putting the banhammer down on you.

Anyway I’m done with the subject lest I stoke Orac’s ire, since he just wants to see you go away.

I’ll just put your e-mail address in automatic moderation until we work something out. Unfortunately, I just learned that my power went out again. There might be no new post tomorrow again. Rrrrr. Stay tuned. I will, however, have Internet and battery power enough to moderate comments.

Travis, you’re not making a good case for yourself by impersonating another user. To make a court case of it you must come to court with clean hands. You would be laughed out of a police station, much less a court room, if you tried to make a stalking case out of my post because of your other activities here on RI. It’s hysterically funny that a banned person who makes a habit of impersonating others (including a well loved late commentator) whines about being doxed.

I didn’t reveal your address, SSN, employer, phone number, or any other information that others could use to harass you. I repeated publicly available information. That’s why I said it was doxing in the “strictest sense of the term” in that I looked you up on Google to find that information. Doxing and stalking/harassment are not the same thing. Doxing moves into the realm of criminal/civil code violation when harassment/stalking follows and/or damages occur.

Even the folks who did repeat your address and real name, you would have a hard time proving harassment unless you can prove anyone here started calling you and harassing you.

I doubt I even violated the TOS of ScienceBlogs, quite frankly. I’m sure Orac or someone else with SB will let me know if I’m wrong about that.

In the meantime, have you registered your care and obtained proof of insurance?

For the second time, my SAAB is registered and has always been so. It was my other car that I was driving to get groceries because my SAAB was awaiting a new brake fluid pressure sensor thingy. The heavy SAAB is nearly undrivable without power brakes.

I had to drive my other car which had an expired registration. I didn’t bother registering that one because it wasn’t running very well at the time of renewal.

And the truth is, if you would simply behave yourself and conduct your comments in a mature and honest fashion (which does not mean you have to agree with anyone), then no one would care about anything else and Orac would not keep putting the banhammer down on you.

Well, most of all long-time commentators here are flaming psycho-bullies or shameless propagandists. Behaving like an αsshole seems to be the norm around here.

Decades ago ago an MIT computer scientist who helped to develop the modern Internet discovered that one of his excellent photographs had been used without attribution or payment by the head of a commercial enterprise. When the thief refused to pay or to take down the image, the scientist responded by publishing the thief’s name in close proximity to damaging personal information (thief, asshole, history of the transgression, etc.) because, the scientist reasoned, anyone searching for that person’s name would inevitably turn up the negative information, and so the thief would be appropriately punished by being forever linked to the evidence of his assholery.

You’ve strenuously endeavored to duplicate that situation. Good luck with that.

Oh, how I wish we could get Travis in front of Judge Judy. She’d evicerate that ridiculous claim that he “had” to drive an unregistered car.

No one “has” to drive an unregistered car, Travis. You CHOSE to do that, and you got nailed for it. Karma. Ditto insurance. I don’t give a rat’s ass what your problems with your regular car were. It is ILLEGAL to drive an unregistered, uninsured vehicle.

You should have called a cab, taken a bus, or gotten a friend to give you a ride to the grocery store. If you have friends. Or starve. But there is NO excuse for driving an unregistered, uninsured vehicle.

And you don’t have to use other people’s names. Quit whining about having to game the system to post here. You were banned because of your poor behavior. It’s not our fault it’s yours. YOU are the problem.

At the risk of feeding the troll, the last car but two was a Saab, and it wasn’t close to heavy at all. In fact most Saabs are fairly lightweight, owing to the front being collapsible in the event of a moose advent. Soo I’m going to assume that is much like most of his other comments- not even close to truthful.

What? My ’92 SAAB over 2,600 pounds? This may seem light to you but I used to own an ’87 VW Fox. The SAAB is a tank by comparison

And Alain, it was the power brakes, not the power steering.

BYW, most of the effort that goes into steering with inoperable power steering comes from forcing the fluid through the circuit. You will find that a car with a manual steering rack is much easier to drive than a car with defunct power steering.

Mr. Odious S: Again, Saabs are designed to be light weight, liar. 2,000 pounds isn’t that much.
And even if the car isn’t an option..well, there are bicycles, which maybe you haven’t heard of. There’s also these nifty things called feet. I’d suggest phoning a friend, too, if the errand absolutely requires a car, but from your posts, I’d be surprised if you had any.

Note that (bolding mine) “Records not open to public inspection are not displayed on the WCCA website. Confidential court records include adoptions, juvenile delinquency, child protection, termination of parental rights, guardianship, and civil commitments.”

Click past the agree, and search by name. You will see 3 citations on 07-09-2002, (when he would have 17, not 16) – Operating while Intoxicated (2nd) Guilty / No Contest, Resisting or Obstructing an Officer Guilty / No Contest, and the previously mentioned Vehicle Operator Flee/Elude Officer, which was Dismissed on Prosecutor’s Motion. So, yeah, nothing more than drinkin’ beer. And drunk driving. For what appears to be the second time.

So, yeah, to me too it looks like plea deal – they had him on enough that any normal kid would have been scared straight, but not our boy. Two years later, Operating While Revoked, two years after that Operating While Revoked, then 3 years later, at 24 freakin’ years old, Operating While Revoked, then the string of no registration and no insurance charges in 2014, 2015, and 2016.

I don’t give a rat’s ass what your problems with your regular car were. It is ILLEGAL to drive an unregistered, uninsured vehicle.

Having the proper papers does not a safer car make. I truely wish that motor vehicle operators need sign a waiver not to sue the government in case of damage; Get the cops out of the ticketing buisness– It makes no one safer to foul traffic like they do. The majority of people are not out to be homicidal maniacs on the road; it’s their shit to. Liability insurance is usually a good idea in any event.

I’ve been driving a fully-papered truck for the past four years without a brake booster– I’d let the brakes get bad beforehand (scrubbing roters) and had been stopping with the e-brake in combination with the regular ones. I knew the booster had gone bad but found it incredulous that single point of failure would so prevent one from stopping the truck. Others agreed, including a couple mechanics. I thought it might have been the wrong type of material for the pads and shoes (and new rotor) I replaced as that is when the poor braking performance really revealed itself to be only a little better than just the e-brake. On a damp morning, the brakes were touchy and stopped good for the first or second application only — A rust layer on glazed drums gives that extra ‘grab’.

Anywho, traffic had been increasing in a bad intersection in the saddle of a hilly road and this prodded me into doing the brakes. A mechanic friend had been telling me he’d fix them if I’d just bring it over; Sight unseen, he thought the only problem was the back drums not adjusted out enough. This was not the problem. I forked over the dough for a new booster and that fixed it.

’60’s and ’70’s vehicles I drove would stop without a working booster but not the ’96. As it turns out, a little over half an atmosphere (-8 psi) on that 11 inch booster can deliver an extra 725 lbs of force on the pushrod. Who knew?

I find it somewhat odd that your host condemns things like revealing the personal identity of people who post anonymously on the internet. And, here you guys are doing not just that, but revealing the personal address of someone you don’t like as well as looking up their criminal past.

Oh no…I get it. Doxxing and such is only ok if you guys do it. I completely understand that your own standards do not apply to you.

As cool as the “born from jets” slogan at Saab is, sadly it is really not entirely true anymore. That’s the history of the name, no longer the history of the vehicles. Saab Automobile was spun off and became wholly owned by GM.

It’s true that Saab was the first company to use a windtunnel in design of an automobile, but this isn’t as revolutionary a thing today as it was back then.

I’m really surprised people are still running with the “born from jets” thing. UK Top Gear (original presenters) had a lovely piece on the history of Saab, the great cars and the terrible cars. And the thing that really struck me was that Saab was much more like Volvo in its dedication to safety than anything airplane-y.

Travis, if you stopped coming here as a sock puppet, we would stop talking about you. Really. Since you’re going through the comments on really old posts, how often do you see us talking about trolls of yore?

How about give it a week long trial: don’t post under any nym for a week, and see how often the commentariate mentions you.

I find it somewhat odd that your host condemns things like revealing the personal identity of people who post anonymously on the internet. And, here you guys are doing not just that, but revealing the personal address of someone you don’t like as well as looking up their criminal past.

Two things to note, Travis Schwochert from Endeavor, Wisconsin –

First, if you stop, we stop. Go away, and never post here again, and we will never mention you again. You’ll be forgotten like the cum-stain you are.

Second, I may think you’re an idiot, and I may think you should be driven from polite society, and I might say so often and clearly, and I might be an a$$hole (and all four of those statements are almost certain), but I won’t lie about you, nor will I allow someone else to lie about you, even you. You told Panaca that your fleeing charge was when you were doing nothing but drinking beer at 16, and that is just not true. You were 17, and you were not found guilty of fleeing. Facts matter. If you’d just told the truth, I’d have no reason to bring it up.

Did you just do too many drugs and drink too much beer for a young, developing brain? Is that the cause for your memory problems?

I’m old enough to remember 2-stroke SAABs (and DKWs). I saw one once that was laying down a cloud of blue smoke behind them that obscured all 8 lanes of Highway 99. I swear they must have reversed the ratio of gas and oil when they were mixing it.

“Second, I may think you’re an idiot, and I may think you should be driven from polite society, and I might say so often and clearly, and I might be an a$$hole (and all four of those statements are almost certain), but I won’t lie about you, nor will I allow someone else to lie about you, even you.”

Except, as your host can verify (though I doubt he will, knowing his penchant for bias, paranoia, and hypocrisy), I am not Travis. So, what were you saying about lies?

Do please continue with your hypocrisy…it is extremely amusing!

Oh, by the way Orac…nice job of showing your paranoia by blocking out one of the IP addresses I use from commenting. I mean, after all, you don’t believe in censorship or anything…nor do you believe in Doxing…unless it’s you and your sycophants doing it, of course.

I really didn”t detest Travis the way most of you did until he impersonated lilady. I had no dog in the fight.

Drunk drivers, OTOH, I view as lower than pond scum. I’ve taken care of the wreckage they turn innocent people into one too many times to have any regard for drunk drivers whatsoever. They should be locked up for a year on the first conviction, no probation, no suspended sentence, and have their licenses suspended for a year after they get out. No mercy, as they give the general public none by their actions.

Today is the 25th, and the last day for Mikey’s White House petition, asking the government to force a private company to preform an action in violation of that companies published policies. The petition needed 100,000 ‘signatures’, and it will probably expire with less than 72k.

Sure, Google “caved in” and re-indexed NN, after NN made the necessary changes. But I really thought Mike had the audience to pull this off. I guess not.

My God, I’m astounded by the deliberate ignorance you fags running this blog exhibit. No shit google delss malware sires,etc. Thefact remans they are also engaging in brad censorship whether you are smart nough to see it ornot. THEY ENGAGE IN CENSORSHIP BECAUSE THEIR VIEWSS DON’T STAND UP TO SCRUTINY. TYPICAL LIBERAL TACTIC – IF YOU CAN’T DEFEND YOUR OPINIONS, SILENCE THE OPPOSITIONS. I can just picture you fags sitting around your office gossiping sipping skinny lattes. You are the typical feminized liberral “men” who “pranced” along in the womens march. Completely useless eunichs. Well, your “girfiends” might find you useful to be on the receiving end of their strapons. “Femocrats” like you should be less impressed by your perceived, but non-existant, intellects and open your fucking eyes to see what’s really going on around you. When you do finally enounter embodied opposing opinions on the street in real life, I’m sure you’ll pounded into tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you in person, fags. I’ll be happy to do my part to rid our country of you mentally defective sexual chimeras. Or, please kill yourselves.

Yet another slave, cuckolded by his betters and feeling superior for the experience.
Rather than learn truth, facts, corporate protection of reputation, no, slavishly obeying one’s betters, who are actually rather dubious in terms of morality, to be overly generous.

Shay: Bigotry means being prejudiced against minorities. I am not. figuring out what people are thinking and tuning into that is simply a smart way of navigating life.

(Also, knowing statistics. If one demographic leads all the others combined in producing, say, serial killers, militias, or anti-vaxxers, or people who hate the parks system, well, maybe being cautious isn’t a bad idea.)

1. a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.

2. a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.

3. hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.

As far as I know, nobody (and, for sure, not me) has ever accused PGP of being a racist, or of saying racist things.

I don’t care if you fit the definition of the word “bigot” to a T or not. But your intolerance and paranoia towards what you see as the majority is quite clear, and I tend to skip your comments for this reason.

How very insightful!
Yet another zero information, clueless idiot, fresh from the idiot factory.

But, yes, the author is paid – to perform surgery. That means that he also has a medical degree, which tells you that you are the idiot, not the author.
Who makes a hell of a lot of money more than you make on your twinkie encrusted sofa.

My experience has been that the second someone refers to a blog post like this one, or a paper in a scientific journal, as an “article”, they’ve outed themselves as a moron and you can quit reading at that point. Saves time.